Tourist Says Traveling In A Wheelchair Opened His Eyes To His 'Love Of The World And The People In It'
He's traveled more extensively than most able-bodied people have, and he's on a mission to make it more accessible for wheelchair users.
Halfpoint | Shutterstock A lot of people would say that traveling is one of their favorite hobbies. There’s so much to discover and explore out there if you’re willing to step outside of your comfort zone — or in some cases, roll outside your comfort zone. A tourist named Cory Lee has visited 50 different countries and all seven continents, but he has a different perspective from some other travelers. That’s because Lee is a wheelchair user.
Lee created Curb Free with Cory Lee, a blog where he shares accessible travel guides for the many destinations he’s traveled to. He has proven that being able-bodied is not a necessary prerequisite for travel, and aims to share the love he has for wandering the globe with others.
Lee’s travel journey began when he was very young.
Lee shared his incredible story with Travel + Leisure. “At the age of 2, I was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy, a form of muscular dystrophy,” he explained. “It basically means I have overall muscle weakness. By 4 years old, I was not able to walk at all and had to use a power wheelchair full-time.”
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The first trip Lee can remember is going to Disney World shortly after he began using a wheelchair. He admitted to still having a soft spot for Disney since the park is pretty accessible. After that, he traveled internationally for the first time when he was 15. That trip to the Bahamas was “when the travel bug really bit me,” he said.
While he came to love traveling at such a young age, he acknowledged that it’s not always easy to do so as a wheelchair user. On his first trip to New York City, he got trapped underground in the subway system because the elevators weren’t working. The first time he was in Europe, his wheelchair charger “blew up” when he plugged it into the wall with a converter.
Although these incidents have been bothersome, Lee argued that the biggest barrier to travel for him and other wheelchair users is the lack of accessibility. Thankfully, this is slowly changing. Lee contributed to this shift himself with the creation of his own blog in December 2013.
Throughout his travels, Lee has always emphasized the goodness of people.
Lee told Travel + Leisure, “I’ve found that people everywhere are friendly and helpful, and there’s so much empathy.” He saw this empathy in action several months ago when he was in Seoul, South Korea. On his Instagram account, @curbfreewithcorylee, he shared a reel featuring footage of the kindness strangers at a restaurant showed him when his wheelchair was too tall to fit beneath the table.
Restaurant staff propped the table up using metal cups under each of its legs to make it taller. “It was a small gesture, but it reminded me that kindness is everywhere,” he said. “Sure, there’s a lot of bad in this world, but I fully believe that there’s more good.”
Now, Lee is doing what he can to make accessible travel possible for others.
In 2018, Lee began hosting travel meet-ups where his Curb Free readers could come and travel through different destinations with him. Lee said that he repeatedly heard from people with disabilities that they wanted to travel, but finances made it impossible. To remedy this, he created The Curb Free Foundation, which “provides travel grants to wheelchair users for their dream trips.”
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So far, Lee has been able to send people to his beloved Disney World, Morocco, and the Caribbean. He even helped an 80-year-old man take his first trip to the beach at Tybee Island.
According to an estimate from Harvard Health, over five million Americans use wheelchairs. Lee is working to make a more accessible world for them all, so they can see the world as he has. As he said so eloquently, “The general public of able-bodied people need to see wheelchair users living these amazing lives and traveling around the world, and it will really change perspectives.”
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
