The diagnosis didn’t arrive like a tragedy. It arrived like an answer.
Twenty-three years ago, right after my son was born, CMT finally introduced itself properly — Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, progressive, incurable, and apparently something I’d been living with my entire life without knowing it. Suddenly everything made sense. Why I fell constantly as a kid. Why I couldn’t climb a rope or do a pull-up or run like other children while everyone around me just assumed I wasn’t trying hard enough.
I was trying. My nerves weren’t.
The exacerbation that followed my son’s birth was severe enough that I could barely walk. We lived in a raised ranch home. There were stairs. For four months my world was my son and the walls of our home.
Then I got better. Not cured — CMT doesn’t do cured. Just better enough to get moving again.
So What Is CMT, Exactly?
It’s a neuromuscular disease that attacks the nerves controlling my hands and feet. Walking is work. Balance is a daily negotiation I don’t always win — I stumble, I grab walls, I have made embarrassing contact with more than one doorframe in an otherwise dignified hotel lobby. Stairs are my standing enemy and have been for decades.
I move slowly. Always have. But here’s what slow buys you that rushing never will: you notice everything. The tiny mushrooms growing wild along a Mayan ruin path. The way children laugh in every language. The espresso in Rome I can still smell if I close my eyes.
I spent years traveling domestically first — full weeks in Las Vegas heat, working trade shows, keeping up without letting anyone see exactly how hard keeping up actually was. Eventually I figured out keeping up wasn’t the goal. Showing up was.
In 2018, the thought of Washington DC — all that walking, all that standing — finally outweighed my pride. I took my scooter for the first time.
Everything changed. Not because the scooter fixed CMT. Because it gave me back the energy to enjoy where I was going instead of spending every ounce just surviving the getting there.
That realization is the whole blog.
Who Is G?
I’m G. Design leader. Accessibility expert. CMT warrior. Travel obsessive. The person who will spend days researching a single destination so you don’t have to — reading accessibility reviews, cross-referencing terrain reports, checking tide tables, watching other travelers’ videos frame by frame looking for curb cuts and cobblestones and the exact height of that one notorious step.
CMT. Jet lag. A body that had opinions about every single step.
I went anyway. I would go again tomorrow.
I travel with a scooter when I need one and without it when I don’t. I pack a 4-inch portable step because high van floors stopped being my problem the day I bought one. I board last so I know exactly what I’m walking — or rolling — into. And yes, I still stumble sometimes. Walls have caught me in four continents.
I’ve been carried up three flights of stairs like a queen by four Paris kitchen staff just to make a team dinner. I went to the Taj Mahal with CMT, jet lag, and zero regrets.
I would do it again tomorrow.
This isn’t a site about limitations. It’s about what happens when you stop waiting for perfect conditions and just go anyway — whether that’s a cruise, a city, a UNESCO site, or a restaurant with no elevator and four kitchen staff who’ve got you.
Plan. Adapt. Go!