For decades now, the O&M students have gone on an annual trip to New York/New Jersey to visit the Seeing Eye (dog guide school) and Helen Keller National Center. The Seeing Eye has grant money and they fund most of the trip – ticket, hotel and all. We’ve heard over and over how amazing it is. And it definitely sounded fun! But now that I’ve gone, I truly understand what was so “amazing” about it. It was the perfect mix of sightseeing, inspiration, education, friendship and laughing!
There are 9 of us in our program this year, but only 6 could go. Myself, Erica, Jenna, Natalie, Joyce and the lone guy Xavier…who is really just one of the girls ;-) It was actually a perfect size group. And we all stayed together nearly the entire time. Just a great blend of personalities. And such a variety of ages, backgrounds and stages of life…but it meshed to be so fun and so easy.
I was nervous about situating my kids and life to be gone for 7 entire days. I’ve never been gone that long. Thanks to family and friends, and Tucker not traveling that week…it all worked out with about a 95% accuracy.
We slept very little, ate a lot, walked a ton, and learned so much. I don’t think I can possibly sum it up in one blog post…but I’ll try.
We left San Francisco Airport at 6:30 am…which meant we had to be up by 4:00 (I stayed in a hotel with Joyce the night before since I live three hours away)…so we kicked off the week with hardly any sleep. A trend that would continue!
Here we are at JFK right after our 6 hour plane ride. Tired, starving (because the airplanes no longer serve food unless you travel internationally or want to pay a lot for a crappy cold prepackaged meal) but ready to EXPLORE NYC!!!
After the plane ride, we still had a 90 minute van ride to New Jersey (where our first portion of the trip was)…then we unpacked and took a 80 minute train ride BACK into the city! See why we were tired all week? This was the trend. Not a second was wasted.
Before I get to the sightseeing, I’ll show some highlights from our days at The Seeing Eye. It’s in a beautiful town in New Jersey, Morristown. Old and well kept…and very expensive place to live. The Seeing Eye put us up in a fabulous hotel and really laid out the red carpet for us. We were there with two other O&M schools (Colorado and Boston), as well. Besides the great dinners and hotel…I absolutely loved learning more about what really goes into breeding, raising and training a guide dog for the blind. It is absolutely incredible. Each dog that is placed costs $64,000! The Seeing Eye is run primarily by private donations (they only charge the blind $150 for the dog). It was founded in 1929 and was the first dog guide school.
It was so fun because we got a lot of hands on experience too. We watched the dogs being trained, watched blind people being trained with their new dogs…and then got to walk with them ourselves! That was so fascinating. We are all very used to traveling under blindfold at this point, but walking with a dog is SO much faster than with a cane! It took some getting used to. I just loved seeing the simple, yet bold, commands the dogs learn. And how smart and hard working these dogs have to be to be so aware of the blind traveler. They watch for obstacles and know how to react to curbs, moving vehicles and danger. They also have to be trained on “intentional disobedience” which means…when the traveler says “forward” they need to walk forward UNLESS there is danger…and then they have been trained to disobey their master. I wanted to pet each dog we saw, but when a dog is “working” (under harness), they should not be distracted. The second that harness comes off though…they are free to be a dog, they are “off duty”. The dogs they breed are German Shepherds, Golden Retrievers and Labs.
We were able to spend two afternoons/evenings in the city…so we walked as much as we possibly could and saw as much as we could fit in. It was all about quantity instead of quality this trip! It was my first time in NYC and it was just amazing to walk around and just see soooo many famous places block after block. It really felt exactly like I thought it would. Sort of like being in a movie. We were definitely tourists! We were definitely lucky because the weather was so perfect. Mostly in the 50s.
That first night, we went to a restaurant “Cafeteria” recommended by some of Xavier’s friends (who met us there). It was very posh…but not AMAZING. We walked around sightseeing in the dark as much as we could…and finally did the long train ride and walk back to the hotel for some much needed sleep. But then the next morning we turned around and went right back into the city (every time we went it was a 80 minute train ride each way and a round trip $52!).
Eating New York Cheesecake in New York :-)….…..and the Empire State Building!
Ground Zero where the World Trade Centers were…and now they are building the Freedom Tower. It was very surreal to be there and to know the havoc and heartache that occured there. It was such a crammed area in between so many buildings…I can’t imagine the claustrophobic chaos it must have been.
I also found it fascinating how they do their trash system there. First of all, there is not recycling waste program…which bugged me. But also, the streets are lined with bags of garbage all throughout the city. Apparently trash trucks pick them up daily, but they still do it the old fashioned way where a man physically picks the bags up and tosses them into the trash truck.
New York Pizza! Really is different. Most of it does not come with sauce, and the crust is very unique. I really liked it. Here is Natalie, Erica and i on one of our many subway rides.
Spent some time in Central Park…here we all are on a bridge there. And the Statue of Liberty…we saw her from a distance ! I wanted to take the ferry out there so bad, but we didn’t have time :-(
Times Square! The only other place I’ve been that felt like this was Tokyo. Felt so similar. New York made San Francisco feel very small and slow paced! (I love this jumping pic of Natalie)
Rockefeller Plaza…the flags in the background surround a huge ice skating rink. This picture shows one of the many beautiful churches that lay in between skyscrapers. I can tell they are so old and historic…and just beautiful.
Another Empire State Bldg shot…and another subway shot.
Penn Station is the main train hub. It really is so huge, it’s like a humungous airport. And it can get hot and gross at the busy times of day…with lots of gross ppl.
Love this picture of Erica posing with a fake Statue of Liberty.
The train! Jenna, me, Erica, Natalie, Joyce and Xavier. This next picture is one of the many nights out after our classes/dinner/seminar. These other students we met are from Colorado. See the guy with the army green pants on the left? From the first moment he was nicknamed “green pants” and we teased Jenna that he was her boyfriend since she is single and he was the only single guy in the bunch. Ahhh, green pants somehow stayed funny the entire week!
Oh my gosh, this was so funny. None of this will be even 5% as funny on the blog as it was in person. But another running joke throughout the week started when we first introduced ourselves at the first seminar. We said what school we were from…and later joked we SHOULD have said “I’m Jamie…and I’m a Gator (insert out whole group throwing out three fist pumps simultaneously in the air)” totally straight faced. For some reason it was SO funny that we actually practiced it all week. (sidenote: SFSU are the Gators…and we were very proud to be from SFSU because it became very obvious in talking to the two other schools there that we were trained significantly more than they were…especially being that they were online programs!).
I NEVER fall asleep anywhere but my bed. But I was so tired, obviously, I crashed on the train! And they caught it on camera :-)
OK, so next stop was the Helen Keller National Center in Sands Point (Long Island area), NY. We weren’t exactly sure what to expect because we had such an amazing time at The Seeing Eye. We knew we were going to be staying in the dorms at HKNC and eating at their cafeteria. Both those parts of the trip were exactly how they sound. Dorms were WAY less fab than our hotel, and food in the cafeteria was definitely cafeteria food! BUT, the environment and experience more than made up for it. The cafeteria was cool because we got to eat at the same time as the deaf-blind students that were there. And the cafeteria staff could not have been kinder to us. We spent our time with Gene Bourquin who is one of only three certified deaf-blind O&M interpreters in the USA. He was incredible. Passionate, smart, experienced. He poured as much as he could into us during our day and a half with him. He made us all want to learn sign language and work with deaf-blind! (there are various levels of deaf-blind there…not all of them are 100% deaf AND blind like most ppl imagine. Many have SOME vision or SOME sight, but not functional and need many adaptations to independently survive in the real world).
*at both these places, we were not allowed to take pictures of the actual students that reside there*
This elevator was cool. There were 10 panels like this in the elevator so any student could always locate their floor.
We were able to do little tasks using simulators.
And the coolest part of the time there was our experience using public assistance as a deaf-blind person, using a communication card. It was absolutely fascinating to watch how the public interacted. We set up each scenario so the public did not know we were with the “deaf-blind” person. They held up this card (as you see me holding) and literally within 1 minute, every single one of us was helped across the street. Some ppl even stopped their cards mid intersection to hop out and help the person cross! It was so awesome. Gene has done SOOOO much research on this and it was fun to see some of his research data in action.
(Natalie and Erica pretending to do tactile signing- which, by the way, is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. Not when they did it, but when Marisol presented to us…who has Usher’s disease and is deaf-blind…but also has her Master’s degree and travels around the world presenting to ppl. Incredible. Watching her with her interpreter using tactile signing felt like magic. If you haven’t seen it, youtube it or something.)
Our group with Gene and Sister Bernie – fabulous people and I hope to spend time with them again.
That is definitely a nutshell version of my trip! I loved every second of it. Came back as drained as you can be, but it was all worth it. Probably didn’t help that we returned on a Friday night at midnight and I had to stay in the city that night to attend a Saturday workshop for one of my other classes from 9-4…and THEN drive home). Oh my...it took me about two days to feel normal again. But what a life-changing experience and was another thing to get me excited about what I’m learning and how my eyes continue to be open.
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