A few months back, my trusty little Pentax camera got sick. Some sort of misalignment in its lens caused the camera to make an awful grinding sound as the camera started and, in self preservation, the camera quickly shut itself down. I didn’t know what to do with it, or even if it was fixable.
Rather than dwell on the problem, I started using Michael’s beautiful, powerful, very complicated camera for updating the blog, but a couple of weeks before the London trip, it occurred to me that I wasn’t going to take that camera with me. Aside from its being relatively large (not easily totable in the city), I would be terrified of harming or losing it while there (family and old friends may remember that we once lost a camera in Europe and I didn’t want to repeat that experience).
A whole two weeks before the trip, I got serious about this issue. A bit too late. I took the Pentax to a local camera store and they said, sure, they could send it to Pentax to have them look at it for a repair, but it would cost at least $140 to have them look at it (no guarantees of repair) and at least four weeks before it would be returned.
I thought again about taking the big camera. Then I thought about buying a new, small camera, but I felt too much pressure to find the right one in a couple of weeks.
Then Michael discovered a box in the basement that said “Hyla’s Cameras” and when we opened it up, we found Hyla’s simple, little digital camera. So simple, I thought, that even I could figure it out. Well, it proved portable enough, but more complicated than I bargained for. So all I could do was take a basic point-and-shoot picture. I couldn’t even figure out how to use the zoom. And I had no idea how many pictures it could hold on its card or how long its batteries would last, so I felt afraid to use it in case I would use it up.
It’s not that I didn’t have warning about the trip (a year-and-a-half) and it’s not that the Pentax died just a week before the trip or something.
If I had thought about it for even a few minutes a couple of months ago, I could have saved myself some worry and had a lot of nifty pictures from the trip. As it is, though I did get a few pictures, which I’m sharing with you now. We have some other pictures (on my sister’s much nicer camera) and when she gets those to me, I’ll share those, too.
And maybe someday soon, I’ll go camera shopping in earnest. I swear I’ll be prepared for my next trip to London.
The Queen Victoria Monument in front of Buckingham Palace:
Me, balancing on a tiny lip on the edge of that same monument:
The moon over Big Ben (taken from Trafalgar Square):
A section of the bacon display at Harrods Department Store:
The sign at Maidenhead station, taken around midnight, after missing the train to London, on the coldest night in London ever recorded in history*:
* slight exaggeration, but only slight
Grongar 