Over the last week, I’ve had the most wonderful time at the American National Planning Conference in Denver.
Since we arrived in Denver, literally everyone we met has been polite, friendly and helpful and have made us feel so welcome.
The conference itself has been a real career highlight, and we are so grateful to our boss, Antoni Facey, for giving us the funding and opportunity to attend. All the sessions we attended have been wonderful, with excellent speakers, and plenty new to learn, and we will share more of what we have learnt at the conference and our Colorado experience over the coming months.
A highlight though, has been the people we have met while at the conference. In terms of planners, we were so lucky to randomly meet Katherine, a planner who works in Seattle, at the bus stop near our accommodation on the first day, followed by Brian, also on the bus, who helped us negotiate the transport system and gave us valuable advice on all sorts of things throughout the conference itself. We continued to meet friendly, pleasant planners from all over the United States throughout the conference, both on our mobile workshops, during sessions and between sessions, and it was great to be able to compare notes on our respective planning systems. I thoroughly enjoyed improving my american geography, from all the planners from all over the States, that I sat beside on various buses, who we had lunch with, and attended the ice hockey with, and enjoyed wide ranging discussions with a range of interesting people on the mobile workshops.
We also thoroughly enjoyed the experience of the ‘Hub’ which was a fabulous opportunity to meet representatives from various companies, organisations, universities and also other planners. I think we gave some people a bit of a surprise that we had come all the way from New Zealand, and we got plenty of offers from all manner of planning software company representatives suggesting that they would be more than happy to visit New Zealand to show off their planning software solutions!
Thanks so much to you all, especially Katherine, for helping us so much (and to your oldies for looking after our luggage and treating us to a visit to the beautiful Denver Botanic Gardens).
We have thoroughly enjoyed meeting everyone at the conference, and, with any luck, we will be able to attend again some time soon!!
More to come as we digest what we have learnt, but for now, we head off on a short Colorado road trip, starting with a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park! The photo below was on our extremely beautiful, extremely cold walk around Bear Lake!!
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