Eyesight
 

While reading the thread about Essentials you take on trips, I noticed extra Eyeglasses were important. Which led me to wondering, has anyone broken/lost their glasses while traveling in another country and what did you do? Was it terrible?
I myself need reading glasses now :( and I worry that I will spend a holiday, squinting at menus, ordering moose instead of moules, having my husband describe everything to me!
So tell me your Eyesight/Eyeglass stories, so I can better prepare :)
Thank you, Scarlett~

I buy my reading glasses for $2 at the local salvage store. Surely you can pick up a travel-insurance copy that's about the same as your presrciption? There are even tiny fold-up travel glasses, much like those little scissors. I don't know whether reading glasses (i.e., magnifiers) are available OTC in Europe as they are in much of the US.

My daughter, who has a fancy expensive presecirption, takes her old pair (i.e., previous prescription) and a copy of the prescription itself, in case she meeds to have a new lens made.

Reading glasses are EASY to replace, Scarlett. They are available OTC in most of Europe. Good selection in Boots in England :S-

Travel to any major Western Europe city & you'll find shops with one hour or one day eyeglass replacement service. This is not unusual at all & prices are about like you'll find in the U.S.A.. Now,if you were in a small village & it happened, of course you'd survive without reading glasses til you got home. Those of us who really need glasses to function travel with spares.

Hey, thanks !
I have to have a prescription :( one eye is worse than the other -sigh- so I guess what I will do is get a cheap pair of frames and have a Travel pair ~
Has anyone had a funny/terrible eyesight incident ??
Thank you for amusing me today-I have a strained muscle and cannot move :lol

I always take a copy of the prescription with me. I would hate to be without my bifocals.

Scarlett, you can use OTC glasses even with different prescriptions, I do. (One eye is .5 diopters weaker than the other).) Certainly for a backup pair, an OTC pair would be OK rather than investing in a duplicate "real" prescription pair.

I don't even think about packing them because they are permanently on my nose.

I broke the only pair I had with me whilst I was in Brussels last week. Catastrophically. Permanently. Not supergluable or tapeable.

I was in a meeting from 9am. No ability to buy and over the counter pair and I have to say my eyes are so bad they probably would not have worked.

So I had the joy of discovering that one CAN get from downtown Brussels to upcountry Aberdenshire without being able to see one's hand in front of one's face:)

I wish my son were here to tell the story of his experience In Hawaii, because it was hysterically funny yet horrifying.

As soon as he'd arrived at his destination hotel from the States, he couldn't wait to charge into the surf for the first time. A huge wave came along and snatched off his glasses. He is extremely myopic, so it was a disastrous loss.

He went to an eye doctor in Hawaii, but his prescription is so unusual they had to wait for the blanks for the lenses to be flown in from the mainland. In the meantime, he rented prescription swimming goggles from a dive shop and was managing to get by, but the lure of the surf beckoned once more, and incredibly, another big wave left him minus the prescription goggles!

I wouldn't dream of leaving home without a spare pair of glasses!

Ahh Sheila darlin, that is my worry exactly!!
I think I will get the cheap second pair and just keep them in my carry on, where they will be insurance that I will not lose/break my good ones:)
Squinting does terrible things to ones face >)

Scarlett, my dear, I am going to bean you on the head with one of my many pairs of reading glasses (how about the fuschia ones with the sparklies?). Our trip to Italy is just close enough at this point that I am starting to worry about silly things like how am I going to manage those all those ten hours long dinners in Roma with DH (luckily and kindly answered in another post!). Now you've got me going on eyeglasses. I never thought about bringing extras of those despite the fact that I have regular prescription eyeglasses, contacts, and OTC reading glasses to go on top of the contacts (talk about adding insult to injury, having to wear correctives on top of your correctives!). I've always been lucky enough never to have had a mishap with all my optical paraphenalia. However, I guess it would be prudent, just in case, you know, worse case scenario, could be that one chance in a million, I might just loose or break something on this trip, so RIGHT NOW, I'm going to call my eye doctor and make an appointment! Wouldn't hurt to have another pair & paper prescription along.

My funny eyeglass story took place when I was just 19. This absolutely gorgeous fraternity boy asked me out on a date to Boston for dinner. We were goofing around and he swung me round! My glasses swung round, too, and flew off and crashed on the ground. Of course I was too young and vain to go through a date with helter-skelter lenses, so I ate my food in a blur, trying so hard not to squint at the vision of Adonis across the table from me. Not a complete disaster, though. Adonis turned out to be a complete >:) and I was very glad afterwards to have seen him only in a blur. It made it twice as easy to forget him!

Hope you're in better shape tomorrow \:D/

I always take an extra pair with me just in case so far I was lucky.. but you never know....

Thank you dln :)
I am fine as long as I don't move :lol

This is also a good excuse to buy a pair of frames that might be a little different, odd, fun..while I wear the ordinary ones ..
What styles do you all like?
I have gone for the small nerdy look, although my sunglasses are big and black.
Any eyeglass fashion likes, dislikes?
All pertaining to travel, I got a wonderful pair of Vuarnet sunglasses in Paris and when time comes for prescriptions, I will send the to Vuarnet to be done:)

My sister commented that the sunglasses in Italy were so well made and the styles so different, she was going to buy a pair and have her optician pop the lenses out and replace them with prescriptives. I may very well do the same!

I always bring a back-up pair of contacts, but not my glasses, as I am more likely to drop my contacts and not find them (or not want to put them back in my eyes after I have found them) than I am to sit on my glasses!

I've actually never had a problem, but I always take an extra pair of glasses with me when I travel because I am legally blind in one eye without them. I'd be walking into the wall practially if I didn't. I just take the last pair I had before my new prescription as it's never that different that it wouldn't be okay in a pinch. I also have two very different eyes and OTC is not an option (.5 diopters, hah, mine are 3-4 different).

I don't know where you live, but I've gotten many glasses from For Eyes for twenty years and they have excellent quality and very low prices. If you don't have bifocals or progressives, you can get a pair for maybe $50-75. They have a lot of stylish frames very cheap and outstanding customer service. I think they all get sent and made at the same lab in Florida, anyway.

I think it's fun to have different styles of glasses. I have a regular wire-rim pair and then my more trendy hip pair (tortoiseshell, smaller more horizontal lenses). I don't wear reading glasses, however, these are regular fullsize glasses.

My reading glasses are full size, I didn't want the look of the half glass down on my nose.
I found great frames in Montreal last year, my optician said they weren't sold in the US which made me like them even better. I hate wearing the same thing everyone else does:)
I have been wearing small nerdy grey tinted glasses at night:)

My eyeglasses managed to camouflage themselves perfectly with a bedspread in London in 2001. That's where I found them when I sat on them and snapped them in half. Thankfully I always take a spare pair so I just switched and hoped I didn't break those too.

I have a manila folder of copies of miscellaneous things. One item is always a copy of my current glasses prescription in case I do break my back-up glasses. I'm sure it would be fine in Lyon but I didn't really see any one hour glasses shops in Ambert this May.

Oooh indytravel, what a shocking sound that must have been!
Actually, I sort of know that sound, when pup (younger and more foolish then) took my glasses off the bed and tried to eat them!! ((&))

I never travel without an extra pair of glasses & neither does my husband. (I have to admit to having 6 pair so it's not hard to take 2 with me!) If you just need reading glasses tho and your prescription is something common like +2.25 you can get decent looking ones in Walgreen's (or any drugstore) and keep them with you. Lenscrafters often runs specials on getting two pair for the price of one, or $100 off on two pairs, etc. (Those specials are often for single vision but many times they will apply it to what ever you buy, just ask .. I have and gotten really good discounts).