• Age: 15 to 18
• Grade: 10 to 12

You CAN travel with a walker or wheelchair.

Seniors are living longer, and there are an increasing number of us who have mobility issues but want to live life to the fullest. For those who want to continue to enjoy travelling, the use of a walker or wheelchair may be necessary. Lack of mobility creates problems, so careful planning before a trip is essential. Wheel the World describes some of the difficulties I have encountered when travelling by bus, by ship, and by car. Though these difficulties don’t go away, I hope you will find that they are not insurmountable, and that discovering new places and revisiting familiar ones can still be thrilling and fun.

Jeanette Dean was born and educated in England. She has an honours degree in English, and diplomas in Education of the Deaf and Teaching English as a Second Language from the universities of Leeds and Manchester. Over thirty years later she gained an additional degree in Education from the University of Saskatchewan. She loves to teach and has had students for over fifty years, of which twenty-two were spent at the R.J.D. Williams School for the Deaf in Saskatoon. She and her husband, Christopher, are avid photographers and love to travel. With the encouragement of their children, they have continued travelling, with Jeanette using first a walker, then later a wheelchair. In this way they have visited more than thirty countries. Her favourite country is Vietnam, where she spent a month several years ago visiting UNICEF projects sponsored by Canada. Before retirement, all Jeanette’s writing was concerned with her work in deaf education. She has given numerous papers in Canada, the United States and England on speech and language development. This is her first full-length book describing her adventures travelling by bus in Britain, by car in Canada and the United States, and on cruise ships to Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and Europe. While it has some ideas on journeying successfully and enjoyably despite mobility problems, she hopes that Wheel the World: Travelling with Walkers & Wheelchairs will, above all, express the joy she feels in continuing to travel.

Jeanette Dean's profile page