Shaun Castle cannot imagine a life without travel.
“I love seeing the world. For me, there's no bigger fear than I'm stuck at home staring at a wall,” he said. However, it’s not easy as a paraplegic.
“There's no room for spontaneity. There's no room for surprises,” he said. “Every single portion of my traveling life – and pretty much my life in general, but my traveling life especially – is planned out.”
The same goes for Anne Richardson, who is quadriplegic.
Both are Army veterans who were paralyzed in training exercises years ago. For Castle, it was an L4 spinal cord injury in Heidelberg, Germany, in 2003. Richardson broke her neck at C4, 5, 6 in a training exercise in Alaska in 1999. Now they both work with Paralyzed Veterans of America, which describes itself as “the only nonprofit Veteran Service Organization dedicated solely to helping Veterans with spinal cord injuries and disorders (SCI/D), and diseases, like MS and ALS.”
