Yukon ... continued

Main Street, Whitehorse

I've been back from my Yukon / BC trip a couple days now. I guess it's time to start posting something about the trip.

I enjoyed my trip. It was nice to be free of cell phone and only have periodic internet access available. I canoed the Yukon River ... but I'll [hopefully] write about that in another post.

I enjoyed the conference, although I must say, some of the sessions were quite boring. But, that's to be expected. Some of the sessions were great, like the one on Boredom and Addictions. My presentation went really well. I got a lot of positive feedback, even into the days I was there past the end of the conference. One of my OT instructors was moderating the sessions on the day I presented and she said the attendance was really good and that we did a great job. We made 60 copies (with an official possibility of attendance of 50). Each of us took one (the presenters) and there were 12 copies left. That makes 46 that were picked up. I know some people took more than one to take back for colleagues. Apparently, at least 34 people were in attendance. Another instructor said that was excellent attendance. It would have been good to have more time. We only went over it once before hand, although the plan was to practice a few times. That never happened, but I won't get into that here. It feels good to have praise from instructors who now see me as a colleague.

The site for the conference was beautiful. On a few occasions, I took some time to go down the hiking paths. I also took a few pictures. I'll put that in another post ... blogspot is taking long to upload today.

The town was beautiful in its own way, but really reminded me of pictures I've seen of reserves and northern towns. Hopefully I'll do a post of pics of the town, but here are a few:



There were a number of murals throughout the town.

I did an activity most evenings while I was in Whitehorse. On the Wednesday night, I attended the Meet & Greet briefly. It was kind of boring, but I was also tired from the short night before, so I went back to the hotel early. Didn't sleep, though, until midnight or so. It was bright outside, so I had to prepare myself to sleep by closing the blinds for a while and leaving the lights dim. On Thursday night, I went to the "Rendezvous" activity. I sat with a number of UM instructors. It was good to catch up with them. The meal was fabulous. I think I got back around midnight. On Friday, I went canoeing with a bunch of Manitoba people, mostly instructors. We had a lot of fun. On Saturday night, I went for dinner with many of the same people. Sunday was interesting ... I spent some time with an OT I met at the conference. Ended up meeting another OT I knew from Calgary and we had breakfast together. Someone else who was at the conference joined us too. This guy was a mental health consumer who presented at the conference. He is planning to carve a walking stick for me. He suggested I make a donation to a charity instead of paying him. Neat. We'll see if he follows through.

On Monday, the day I left for Vancouver, the hotel shuttle refused to take me to the airport. The hotel, on my behalf, madly scrambled to find someone to take me to the airport. The handi transit wouldn't take me as I was not registered with them. But, they found a cab company who just recently added a lift. That was an interesting experience in itself. The lift was slightly too short for my scooter, and the scooter almost fell off the back. It took 2 taxi drivers to figure out the system. In the end, I helped them. The taxi driver told me I would make a good taxi driver as I know how to work the equipment. I appreciated the fact that the taxi driver put the lift in ... he did it on his own expense. The lift would work for shorter scooters, power chairs, and wheelchairs. It was precarious getting the scooter off, but with some creativity, it worked. I told the taxi driver I really appreciate the fact that he put the lift onto his van, even though he had been strongly discouraged to do so "because it wouldn't be profitable". He wanted to help people out. This taxi experience was good. Unlike one of my instructor's. Her taxi driver didn't know where he was going and stopped somewhere for instructions. He apparently appeared high. Later, she heard someone say she shouldn't trust taxi drivers there because they were all druggies. Ah well. At least my taxi driver wasn't high. Or didn't appear to be.