In our quest to spend as much money as is humanly possibly on this upcoming holiday, we've added another $400 to the tally by picking up a new camera:
It's an Olympus Tough camera - the one that's advertised by the big slobering dog chewing on it, and it still being OK afterwards. It's supposed to be waterproof to 10m, drop proof from a height of 2m, and still work fine in temps down to -10. So, from the perspective of all that, it should be just what we need for this trip! Yesterday Warren emailed me to let us know that it was -15 when he got up to go to work. So it's going to be a bit chilly, especially with us used to the middle of a tropical summer!
We've been meaning to replace our old camera for a little while now, as it was only a cheapie from BigW when we bought it to replace the broken old Canon, and just to have something. It's lasted OK, but it really doesn't take a good photo, and that something we wanted if we're going all that way. We were (OK, I was) originally leaning to a more advanced Canon camera, but in the end the Olympus won out, simply because we won't need to worry about it anywhere near as much as a good camera. We can throw this one in a bag, or sit on it, or whatever, and it should still be OK. It's certainly built like the proverbial brick out-house, so I dare say it'll stand up to whatever punishment we can dish out.
Mr T has had one of these camera for a couple of years now, and speaks very highly of it. I remember when he first got it, and was showing off photos taken underwater in his pool. His is still going strong years later, and in his words "if it was to break, I'd buy another". So that's a good enough recommendation for me. Hopefully we'll get just as good service from ours! Now I can't wait to try it out for real!
On the topic of the trip, everything's coming together. We've done our online registration for entry to the US, and have been approved, so have added those passes to our pile of documentation we'll need to carry. Our new fancy carry-on bags arrived a couple of weeks ago, so they'll make life a lot easier, and keep us a lot more organised, so long as they'll let us on the plane with them. Technically, they're just smaller than all the airlines' quoted dimensions for carry-on baggage, but they just look huge. Fingers and toes crossed that we won't have a problem.
