Bus Travel

I think I was right there with everyone else because I was not excited at all about getting on the bus.  I was really anxious about having to solicit help.  I just hate asking for help in general, and I think that combined with not knowing exactly how the trip was going to go made for an interesting trip.

I was also pretty anxious about making the bus transfer.  I wasn’t sure how it was going to work, but in the end.  It worked out fine.  Since Lauren was the first off the bus, she got sighted guide.  I tried my hardest to follow them, but after a few steps, the only way I knew where Lauren was to follow her was to call out to her.  It worked, but if I were really blind, I would not want to depend on that strategy.  I thought it would be easy enough to follow her, but because of all the bus noise, I could not tell where she was.  Still, it worked out, and I only felt really uncomfortable when the driver tried to move me to show me how to get on the bus.  I’m sure he was trying to be helpful, but his grabbing me really just distracted me from using my cane properly and surprised me, making me a little mad.

Like Billy, I felt a lot safer traveling in the mall than I did on the bus.  I guess that’s because the mall is enclosed.  I feel like there’s only so much trouble you can get into inside, but outside, the problems are limitless.  That’s interesting, though, because I feel like we probably looked more competent on the sidewalk and the bus than we did in the mall.

I did find that it was really hard to focus on the social aspect of us being together in the mall when mobility was such a challenge.  I was thinking so hard about all the sensory information that I could hardly focus on the fact that I was on a trip with my friends.  I think this was especially apparent in the silence on the bus.  I think another big lesson here might just be that you really have to be flexible when you are traveling blind.  Things will probably not go the way you imagine, but things will work out in the end.

I think that after the bus driver handling me and other experiences over the past semesters, I think I’ve learned to keep my hands off students, even if they are really inefficient and bumbling around.  As long as they are mostly comfortable, it is better for them to move under their own power than for someone to move them.   First, it preserves their integrity as a competent person, and that is of course, incredibly important.  Also, though, it makes them think about what they’re doing so they don’t go into autopilot and miss learning about the world.