Our travel adventure week continues! When I last left off, we’d just made it to our hotel in Providence….
- ♿️ So all of my days this week were taken up with attending the AHEAD 2026 conference. Lots of good information got poured into my head over the past week. Since this is a broader conference than Accessing Higher Ground (AHG), I tried to find sessions either connected to my usual accessible technology focus, to projects I’m currently involved with, or the wider world of disability services in higher education.
- Here’s a look at the sessions I attended:
- Introduction to Disability Law for Disability Office Directors and Staff and ADA/504 Coordinators (a two-day pre-conference session, on Monday and Tuesday)
- OCR Year in Review
- Faculty as Partners in Access: Building Collaboration Beyond Compliance
- Strategies for Enhancing UDL and Digital Accessibility in the Classroom: Insights from Faculty Advocates
- It’s Not My Problem, Right? Liability and Risks Arising from Inaccessible Third-Parties
- Hot Topics in Disability Law
- State & Local Involvement: A Strategy to Impact the Lives of Disabled People (included walking up to the Rhode Island State House building for a tour)
- Crafting Clear Accommodation Wording
- Policy to Practice: Accessible Events by Design
- Overall, the conference was really good, and while I wouldn’t mind going again, I probably get more directly relevant information from AHG when I can go there.
- It was discouraging how often I heard people talking about how much they’re using genAI and what they’re using it for. Even the occasional mention of genAI’s failings and problematic aspects tended to only come up as afterthoughts after a long digression into “I’m feeding every case I review into Claude to pull out the key points” or some such thing. Sigh. It’s sad to see how many people are so eager to offload critical thinking to something that isn’t doing that and can’t do that.
- Here’s a look at the sessions I attended:
- 🚶♀️ While I was conferencing, my wife was enjoying spending her days walking around and exploring Providence, and acting as entertainment director for our evenings. Among the things she found for us to do:
- A stop by the Weird Providence bookstore, which was small but very well curated; she picked up an H.P. Lovecraft collection (because of course), while I picked up a Philip K. Dick collection.
- A tour of the Lippet House Museum, a remarkably well-preserved Victorian mansion.
- The Providence Ghost Tour. Haunted city tours are always fun, and this was no exception.
- A gondola ride along Providence’s river through the heart of the city, complete with Italian serenade by the gondolier.
- And, of course, lots of good food and just enjoying evenings walking around Providence. It’s a really pretty and comfortable city, and we both liked it a lot. If for some reason we decided to move from the west to the east coast, Providence would be high on our list of possible destinations.
- 🚆 When planning this week, we’d decided that as long as we were on the east coast, we might as well take advantage of it, and so rather than flying right back to Seattle, we took Amtrak from Providence to New York City.
- 🗽 We got in to NYC a bit before noon, checked in to our hotel, grabbed hot dogs from a Times Square street vendor, and started wandering. We started heading down toward Bryant Park and the library, and realized as we were walking that we were across the street from the MoMA.
- 🖼️ “Wanna go to the MoMA?” “Let’s go to the MoMA!” So we did, and it was incredible. Knowing that the MoMA has an incredible collection is one thing, actually being able to wander through and see it is a whole different thing entirely. So much neat art that I’d read about and seen images of, but now got to see in person. I particularly enjoyed the Marcel Duchamp and Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera exhibitions.
- 🧛🏻 Then, after getting some great NY-style pizza, we walked up to the Palace Theatre to see The Lost Boys, the new musical that just won several Tony awards. Seeing a Tony award winning musical on Broadway in its initial run with the original cast was a real treat! The show itself was great, too. There were a few notable changes from the original film (as expected when translating a film to the stage), but all the key elements were there, and all the changes worked for me. The music was good (arguably perhaps a bit too heavy on power ballads), but don’t go in expecting the classic soundtrack. This is a new show, not a jukebox musical (though bits of “Cry Little Sister” do get worked in at a few key appropriate moments). We really enjoyed ourselves, and if you get a chance to see this, whether on Broadway or when it goes on tour, I’d recommend it.
- 🍰 On our way back to our hotel after the show, my wife’s cheesecake sensor was in fine form, and she walked us right up to Junior’s Cheesecake, which absolutely lived up to its promise. We each got slices to go, and enjoyed a late night dessert before heading to bed.
- 🥯 This morning we got up, got some proper NY bagels for breakfast, and wandered down to eat them on the plaza of NYC’s iconic Schwarzman library. From there we walked a bit of a loop back to our hotel so we could walk by the Empire State Building. We didn’t go up to the top, but just enjoyed the view from street level.
- 🚕 Finally, we checked out of the hotel, hopped in a taxi (still being rather amused that the “stand on the curb and wave” method of hailing a taxi actually works), and headed to LaGuardia airport to start our trip home.
- ✈️ Which, true to form, is becoming its own adventure. For whatever reason, rather than getting a direct NYC-SEA flight, we ended up with a three leg flight, with each leg being on a new plane. Our first leg was from NYC to Omaha, Nebraska, which is where we are as I type this.
- The Omaha airport, by the way, is not one that we’d recommend (especially for a nearly five-hour layover like we have). It’s small, old, poorly marked, and generally unpleasant. Maybe it’ll be better eventually — they are in the process of renovating and expanding — but at the moment, it’s by far the most unpleasant part of this trip.
- ✈️ The next leg will be from here to Vegas, and then a final jump from Vegas up to Seattle, when we expect to finally land around 1:30 a.m. on Monday morning. So, this post is going up at about 7:30 p.m. Omaha time, still with an hour and a half to go before we leave Nebraska. Not that I’m counting the minutes or anything….
📸 Photos
I brought my “real” camera along for this trip, and have taken a lot of photos, but they won’t be posted until I get through processing them. In the meantime, a few from my phone (not in chronological order).
📚 Reading
While traveling, I’ve finished two more Discworld books by Terry Pratchett (this is my go-to travel reading series at the moment, as I picked the full collection as ebooks some time ago), Guards! Guards! and Eric. Both were fun, and since I still have hours of traveling to go, I’m about to get started on the next one, Moving Pictures.
And that’s it! No links for this week, as most of my brain space was devoted to conferencing and though I was skimming headlines, I didn’t mark anything as particularly noteworthy.