Hello everyone!
Winter is upon us, and though most of the reptiles that we talk about in our shows are safely underground below the frost line hibernating for the winter, we are just as active as ever.
We have now been home in Ontario from our 11 week tour across the country for as long as we were gone. We haven't had nearly as many interesting stories (thus the lack of Blog entries), but we've still been just as busy. We have spoken to thousands of students most of whom seem to have great stories of their own about reptiles they have seen! Part of the program in Ontario includes a survey which all the students do before our program. This survey tests the students knowledge about Ontario reptiles as well as their attitudes towards them. As a way to evaluate our programs, for our own interest and also to be able to present quantitative numbers to our funders, we also have the students do the same survey the day after our visit. This allows us to see changes in their knowledge and attitude, and I must say that a majority of the surveys that I have marked show a significant increase in both! We love marking the surveys and seeing the great comments that students write. On a side note, if you are a teacher reading this who has had our program at your school - don't forget to mail your surveys back, the information is invaluable to us and allows us to continue to provide our programs for free.
I said we haven't had as many interesting stories since our return, however there are two that I can think of. One occurred a few weeks ago when we were traveling to schools north of London Ontario. We were on a 4 day excursion and staying with friends in London in the evenings. One morning we woke up to a heavy snowstorm. Now, we have traveled across our very large country and through mountains in a broken-down van and trailer, a simple snowstorm is not going to stop us - especially since we're now traveling in a car which is in nearly perfect working order (a significant improvement I must say). So off we headed to our morning school. We called the school when we were about 15 minutes away to say that we were on our way and should arrive on time to start our show rather than our usual early appearance. The school was ecstatic. They had already had their afternoon puppeteer program cancel on them and were impressed that we had traveled from the same area out to their school. We arrived just on time and presented our program to an enthralled crowd. After the program we packed everything back into our car which now had 4 inches of snow on top. We brushed off the car, made a run out of the unplowed parking lot and onto the lightly traveled country roads. Our drive to our afternoon school was across more major roads and so was easier than our morning drive had been. It turned out to be quite a successful day despite the almost 8 inch accumulation of snow throughout the day.
The next story happened just last week when Kyle and Jeff were on the road. They were headed out to spend another 4 days this time just west of London. On their way out they got caught behind a truck accident on the 401 near Toronto for about an hour. Now, that in itself is not much of a story, as thousands of people spend every day in traffic and behind accidents on the 401 near Toronto. I think it's interesting because on our trip out west we traveled 11 weeks thousands of kilometres huge distances between shows, and though we sometimes broke down ourselves, one thing we didn't have to deal with was traffic. We were traveling to small communities along rural, often dirt highways and distance was usually our biggest concern rather than traffic. In fact the only traffic we encountered then entire time was when coming into Vancouver. Now that we're back in Ontario, we've had to travel the 400/401 corridor through the Toronto area several times and it always slows us down and makes me wish we were back in the prairies with wide open (though bumpy) roads.
Until next time,
Heather