[nagdu] guidedog and mobility skills

[Mária Orovčíková]

Hello Debbie and all,
this is going to be a bit long mail, so I apologize in advance.
Thank you very much for offering help.
Well, I would like to go places I've never been before on my own.
Let's say I want to go somewhere out of my town and I need to take a few 
buses.
I can get fine from my apartment to the bus stop and take a local bus
which takes me either to the town centre, bus/train station or wherever
I need to go within my town.
Let's say I need to go to the bus/train station. Once I get off the bus 
I must go to a platform or another bus stop from which buses take me out 
of the town. Although I live in a small town, and main bus stop or train 
station are not large areas, there are a few platforms/buses from which 
buses/trains go to different places around the country, so certainly I 
must know which part of the country I need to go to. It is not a big 
deal because when I check train/bus schedules and once I find a bus, 
there is platform number. What I find difficult is to navigate around 
main bus stop/train station to find a platform I need. I know there are 
some options, but I cannot find the one that would work for me. So let's 
see:
1. I could take a taxi which would get me from my apartment straight to 
the platform. The problem is I cannot rely on the taxis in this country 
as we do not have such a law which says that the owner and his guide dog 
cannot be refused being in a taxi and here taxi drivers are not happy to 
take people with dogs, no matter whether it is a pet dog or a guide dog. 
It all depends on individual driver whether they take a person with a 
dog or not; so I'd rather rely on local buses.
2. I can ask mobility instructor to teach me how to navigate the 
platforms. As I live in a small town we have only one mobility 
instructor and she has more than 80 blind people to work with. She 
teaches people not only mobility skills, but also computer skills and 
daily-living skills, so she cannot work with me as much as I would like.
3. I could ask my parents, relatives or friends to show me or describe 
the routes. As for my parents, they both work and they don't have time 
to show me the routes. They are not good at describing routes as well. 
Another thing is that they always go places by car and never use local 
buses.
As for friends, I do have some but they are not in my area. The reason 
is I have been away from my hometown since I was 5. I went to elementary 
and high school for the blind and then to university in different towns, 
so I did not have any chance to make new friends where I live.
When I traveled to university and back home, my mom always took me to 
the bus stop by car and picked me up, so I could not learn the route 
taking local buses.
Yes, it's true, I have a guide dog, but at times I got her, we were 
trained in the city where I attended university. I had someone there who 
was great at describing routes in details, so it was great.
4. Another option is to check the area with GPS app such as blindsquare 
or google maps, but, unfortunately, the platforms are not marked and 
shown in the maps.
So does anyone have any other suggestions how to figure out this 
situation? I really can't and I certainly do not want to be always 
dependent on my mom or someone else to pick me up and take me to the 
train/bus station.
Any ideas would be very highly appreciated.
Thank you for reading this e-mail to the end and for all your help. I 
hope my mail makes sense.
Have a wonderful day.
With kind regards
Maria
On 1. 11. 2014 16:59, debby phillips via nagdu wrote:
> Hi Maria, I'm not sure about any such list.  But perhaps we could 
> help?     Blessings,    Debby and Neena
>
> _______________________________________________
> nagdu mailing list
> nagdu at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nagdu_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nagdu:
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nagdu_nfbnet.org/maria.orovcikova%40gmail.com 
>