An Aussie girl is planning a round-the-world trip of a lifetime – and she's got cycling in France on her bucket list. Here's how you can help. Thanks to Genevieve Swart for these words and Anthony Warry for the photos.
Join us on Twitter and Facebook, where I will post updates on Beth's adventure. You can follow Beth on Facebook.
Beth has a bucket list of 101 things to do around the world. One wish is to cycle through villages and past castles in France. “Well,” Beth says, “mum will cycle and I will just lay back with the wind in my hair and enjoy the sunshine!"
In fact, she wants to cycle with her mum on roads the world over as she travels the globe.
Beth is 11, but small and light, about a metre tall and 25kg, so will only need an ordinary kids' bike trailer to make this wish come true. But she won’t be able to travel along any bumpy roads…
That's because Beth suffers from a severe brittle bone disease called Osteogenesis Imperfecta Type III and has been in a wheelchair since she started school. Her first bones broke in the womb. In her short life, Beth has had 35 fractures and spent months in hospital, including one long summer as a pre-schooler in a full-body cast.
Yet Beth is a joyful, quirky child. She is in Year 5 at a small public school in Stanwell Park, a seaside village south of Sydney’s Royal National Park. She loves swimming in ocean pools, acting in the local panto and busking with her flute. She also has an incredible quality to inspire others – her mother, 32-year-old Katie Cooper-Wares, calls this “her gift”.
“I call her my little guru,” Katie says. “She always says the funniest things to me. Like, if I say, ‘What should I do with my life?’, she goes, ‘Just live it.’ She is my biggest teacher. She’s just so happy, it’s ridiculous.
“They used to call them 'cottonwool babies'. Basically the idea was that you would have to keep them as safe and protected as possible. I haven’t really done that with her as much. I’ve always had the frame of mind that I’d rather she go out and do as much as she can.”
Beth, whose physical condition is likely to worsen as she ages, will be taking on the world in April next year, when mother and daughter set off on a global adventure to tick off 101 things on Beth’s bucket list.
Other dreams include: “get a henna tattoo in India”, “eat pancakes with bacon and maple syrup in Canada”, “visit a sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica” and “swim with snow monkeys in thermal pools in Japan”.
Katie is raising funds via donation website Go Fund Me, gofundme.com/bethsadventure.
Here's how else you can help.
'Life is hard, but nothing is impossible'
There are several reasons for Beth’s gap year (or two). “I want to help further her ability to rise above life’s obstacles,” Katie says. “Yes, life is hard, more so with disability, but that’s OK. Nothing is impossible. You can always find a way. I also want people to be inspired to live a joyful life, no matter what hardships they have. It’s a choice you make every day.”
Biggest travel challenges for a girl in a wheelchair: stairs, escalators, platform gaps and rain. So they’ll start off with the easiest mode of transport: a car. The plan is to fly to the UK next April, buy a van, drive around Europe, then to Russia. There they’ll board the Trans-Siberian train to China.
They will ideally take a bike and trailer with them from London, or hire along the way. (They are looking for support in kind to make either option affordable).
In Australia, Beth’s treatment is covered by Medicare, the national health program. On the road, she’ll need hefty health insurance, one reason Katie has set the fundraising target at $100,000. “I’m sure we’ll break somewhere along the line, it’s probably inevitable,” Katie says. “Her doctors are OK, they think I’m a bit crazy, but that’s OK …”
Katie and Beth will film their trip and blog about it at bethsadventure.com. Perhaps there’ll be a documentary or a book too.
The chateau at Chambord. Cycling in the Loire Valley is on Beth's French bucket list. Photo: Jean-Claude Mouton
The bone disorder
There are many different types of OI. “Beth’s is the second most severe,” Katie says. Her most recent break was earlier this year, when she broke bones in her hip and ankle, simply by overextending to pick up something.
“A young woman with the same OI as Beth died two weeks ago,” Katie says. “She was only 19. But you just don’t know, because they are so individual… Some people with OI live till in their 60s.”
What we do know is people with severe OI have a shorter life expectancy. It’s a genetic disorder and there is no cure.
Today, the rare brittle bone disease has high-profile spokespeople, such as Australian comedian Stella Young. But when Beth was born in Lismore Base Hospital in northern New South Wales in 2003, little was known. While Katie was pregnant, a specialist misdiagnosed her with achondroplasia. “Basically he showed me a picture in a book of a sausage dog, with the long body and short legs…
“So they didn’t know how fragile she was – even though she was delivered by caesarean, they broke her bones pulling her out. They broke her clavicle and her arm and her rib.”
It wasn’t until the next morning when Katie unwrapped her that she realised something was very wrong. “She started crying and her arm was really limp and her legs were also really really bowed…” Katie, just 21 at the time, was straight onto the phone to her paediatrician.
“I was so young ... but when you’re a mum and you’ve got sick kids, when you’ve got to protect them, you become this lioness.”
It was the first case of OI her paediatrician had seen, but he was a pillar of strength, Katie says. “He’d be like, you know best, you’re the mother. Use your instincts.”
Katie returned home with a computer printout on how to deal with OI babies. “I couldn’t ever pick her up under the arms at all. Everything had to be padded. The midwife that came out a week after the birth to check her broke her other arm. I had to sew her all these clothes that she basically Velcro’ed into.”
Mother and daughter have endured many long hospital stays. “When she was little she used to break her femurs quite often and they’d break all the way through, so then you’re in traction for six weeks. She was in that twice, and they were the worst. She was 2, 3. But since then she has had her legs rodded: she has titanium rods in her legs.”
Katie’s family are “amazing”, she says. Once, when Beth was laid up, her two preschool teacher aunts descended on the hospital and decorated her bed, transforming it into a magical mermaid’s cave.
Katie spent long hospital hours gaining a degree in environmental science, and burning off steam on 10-minute sprints on the fire stairs. “You’ve got to find ways of coping. Parents who’ve spent time in hospital … you go insane, you become like a patient yourself.”
Happy school days
Katie and Beth live south of Sydney in Stanwell Park, supported by the close coastal community and public school. “Her principal [Keith Tomlinson] has been great. They’ve had ramps built all through the school and disabled toilets put in. She’s got an amazing aide that she’s had since Kindy (école maternelle)… They shifted her classroom; Year 5 used to be upstairs and they put it downstairs this year. They work around it.”
People see a physical disability first, Katie says. But her school friends, who’ve grown up with Beth since Kindy, are an exception. “I don’t think they think of her any differently, and they are probably the only bunch of people that will probably think like that.
“They pick her up, carry her down the beach. She’ll teach them how to play bottom shuffling races in the playground, things like that.
“Beth never whinges,” Katie says. “She is really grateful and happy with small things … maybe it’s the more hardship you go through the more character you build.”
Beth loves acting (she’s in the local Christmas pantomime). She finds relief in swimming at nearby Coalcliff ocean pool almost every summer’s afternoon (when Council considered closing the rock pool to cut costs, she appeared in TV and newspaper reports as part of the campaign to save it). She is an avid reader (Enid Blyton, Morris Gleitzman) and writer (“she’s got about eight novels on the go”) and plays the flute in the school band. She also enjoys busking.
“You will see her busking at the front of Coles [supermarket],” Katie says. “She makes a killing. She is good! She is very dedicated. She is seriously independent. It’s made her really confident.”
Beth plans to busk with her flute in Europe too. Also on her list of things to do there are: “play chess in thermal pools in Hungary”, “ride a donkey up a street in Greece, just like in the movie, The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants,”; “eat 10 different flavours of gelato in Italy”, “wheel around Amsterdam for a day wearing clogs”, “go to a goat farm in Germany to learn how to make goat’s cheese”; and “visit Enid Blyton’s house”.
A message from Beth (and her flute)
How to help make Beth's dream trip come true
Hoping to depart in April 2015, Katie is using her savings, plus selling all she owns to finance the big adventure. Donations have also been pouring in. “And the most beautiful messages, I just keep crying. Beth gets this giggle, and says, ‘I feel so loved’.”
You can donate at gofundme.com/bethsadventure.
Katie and Beth would also like to hear from accommodation providers or anyone else in France who may be able to host them in kind or make the French leg of their adventure a little easier.
The Loire Valley and the cycling trip is top of the bucket list but as they'll be also driving, Katie is keen to show Beth the best of all the other bits while they're here. 
They will be passing through France en route to other European countries, including Italy, Holland, Germany and the UK. Please contact her at katiecooperwares@gmail.com if you would like to offer support on the ground. I will add a link on Freewheeling France to any businesses or individuals pledging support.
Beth recently starred on the cover of her local magazine, 2508, which is a community publication in the Stanwell park area south of Sydney. Thanks to the magazine for sharing Beth's story with freewheelingfrance.com.
