Wednesday February 10, 2010 - a day that shall live in infamy.
Paula's 4-year-old Canon camera died a sudden death on the journey from Hokitika to Franz Joseph Glacier. Along the way we stopped at a nice remote beach called Okarito.
After that stop, the camera could no longer extend or retract the lens. Either the servo motor died (it was making new funny sounds) or there was a piece of sand lodged in the mechanism. Here is one of the last unfocused pictures she took, captioned "Failing photo of fuzzy father"
Important to this story is to realize that Paula ordinarily takes several hundred photos each day that we are travelling. Our travels iPhoto library started in August 2009 is now around 80 GB and includes 27,000 photos, most of them Paula's. So for her camera to fail her at this point is a major problem that must be fixed as soon as possible. Google to the rescue! Our next planned stop was the tourist town of Wanaka at the southern end of Lake Wanaka, northeast of Queenstown. I suspected that it might have a camera shop, so I Googled "Wanaka Canon camera". Up pops a blog from 2006 written by a nice-looking your couple who were on an extended holiday through New Zealand. Rob is telling his story about mountain biking up to Rob Roy Glacier in the vicinity of Wanaka, and the same thing happened to him! His camera died. So he relates how he went into Wanaka and found a wonderful camera shop that not only had just the camera he wanted, but offered it at pretty much the standard price - - i.e., not gouging the tourists. With that blog story inspiring confidence in us we patiently continued our trip as planned, hanging out around the Franz Joseph and Fox glaciers for a couple of days, and then moved on to Wanaka Friday afternoon, February 12. We went immediately to the camera shop, found exactly what we were looking for, and bought the camera. Paula is happy again! And technology has advanced so much in the past 4 years that the new camera is significantly better for essentially the same price as the old one. It was time to buy a new camera.
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