Earlier this month, Brett and I finally made it to Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri.
My favorite ride.
We had planned to stop there as the big finish to our anniversary road trip last September, but I got sick and we had to ditch our plans and rush home so I could have surgery. Bleh. Anyway, we had a great time in our favorite amusement park and also got to make a quick run down to Fort Smith, Arkansas to see my mom. It was a fun trip.
And then we started home.
You know me – I had some geocaches loaded in my GPSr. I looked up caches in all of the rest stops along our route, so if we stopped, we’d be able to grab our hiking sticks and stretch our legs with a little geocaching. Even though this wasn’t a geocaching road trip, I also targeted a few caches that would take us a little bit off route to places that looked interesting. One such place was a pretty little park along a river out in the boondocks. There were two caches hidden there. We found the first one and I took a couple of pictures of the sun sparkling on the river with the camera Brett gave me for my birthday last year – a Sony Cybershot DSC HX-300.
The other cache in the park was along a walking trail. I handed Brett my camera and asked him to hold it for me while I made a pit stop in the park restrooms before we started down the trail. When I came out of the bathroom, I spotted Brett down by the river, rolling up his pants legs and taking off his shoes and socks. As I tried to hasten down to the riverbank, he stepped into the water and immediately fell. I had just enough time to gasp and say, “Oh, that’s not good,” before he stood up and stepped out of the water. I was so relieved he wasn’t hurt, it took me a moment to notice that my camera was slung across his shoulder.
“Did my camera get wet?” I asked. He got a surprised look on his face; he’d forgotten he had my camera when he stepped into the river. He pulled the strap over his head and handed the camera to me. It was wet. As we walked back to the van so Brett could change into dry clothes, I pushed the power button on the camera. Nothing happened. My heart sank. While Brett was changing clothes, I opened the battery compartment, removed the battery and SD card and dried out the compartment with a paper towel. Brett checked his cell phone, which had been in his pocket when he fell, and it turned on and seemed to be working fine, but nothing I tried got my camera to turn on. As we left the park, I asked Brett why he’d waded into the river. He’d seen something shining just a step from the bank and thought he could step in and pick it up, forgetting how slippery those mossy river rocks can be. It only took one step for his feet to fly out from under him. He picked up the shiny thing when he stood up.
This is the most valuable state quarter in my collection.
I started laughing and couldn’t stop. What else are you going to do? We drove to the next town that was big enough to have a camera shop and the clerk there just shook her head and said there wasn’t much hope that my camera could be saved. She examined it closely and could see water behind the lens and told us when that happens, the camera is considered a complete loss and if we had an extended warranty, Sony would send me a new camera. Brett was pretty sure he hadn’t purchased an extended warranty when he bought that camera, so he bought me a new camera; a Sony Cybershot DSC HX-400. It’s just like the “old” camera, except it has WiFi. In theory, I can upload photos directly to my phone or my computer, and maybe even to Facebook or this blog. The clerk walked me through it, but when I tried on my own after we got home, I couldn’t get it to work. I’m going to have to resort to reading the instructions.
With new camera in hand, we stopped for another cache 20 or 30 miles up the road. By the time we’d found that cache and eaten sandwiches on the tailgate, Brett was beginning to realize that his phone was failing. It had also gotten water in it, but it took longer for it to be affected. I guess cell phones have better seals than cameras. We drove to the next town big enough to have a Sprint store, naively thinking that since we lease our phones and pay insurance on them, he could just trade it in for a new one. Haha! We crack me up. Of course it wasn’t that easy. When has anything to do with getting a new cell phone EVER been easy? He had to go to a website and submit a claim, pay a $200 “deductible” and they would ship the new phone overnight. He couldn’t do any of this until we got to our hotel that evening, so we drove to the next town that was big enough to have a Walmart and stopped for some dessicant. We put my “old” camera and Brett’s cell phone in a Ziploc bag with the container of dessicant and decided we’d had enough geocaching.
It was about ten o’clock that night before Brett got the forms filled out and submitted on the website. They were supposed to be reviewed and somebody somewhere would decide whether a new phone was warranted. We expected that he would be without a phone for several days – not a good thing when he’s got applications for contract jobs floating around and that was his contact number. But when we arrived home around six o’clock the next evening (no more geocaching along the way) there was a package on the doorstep with a brand new phone in it. And it’s supposedly waterproof, so we’ve got that going for us. Of course, when he took his old phone out of the baggie with the dessicant in it, the phone booted up, but I doubt it would have lasted long.
That Hawaiian state quarter ended up costing us about $800 – a new camera, an extended warranty for the new camera, and the deductible for a new phone. On top of that, a pebble thrown up by a semi hit our windshield and there is a two-inch crack that is going to need to be repaired. We thought the windshield was going to have to be replaced – another $200 deductible – but it may be repairable, saving us about eighty bucks if we drop the insurance claim and pay out of pocket. Are we lucky, or what? That drive home, not counting gas, food and lodging, ended up costing us roughly $919.75. Good thing we found a quarter!
