Forgot Your Glasses on Vacation? Here’s What to Do.
The incredibly near-sighted who wear daily contact lenses, like me, face a packing challenge that sometimes turns into a vacation nightmare. There’s nothing worse than taking out your contact lenses in a strange hotel room, fumbling through your toiletries for your eyeglasses and realizing you’ve forgotten them at home. It means that, for the duration of your vacation, you’ll need to wear your lenses longer than normal and fumble around blindly when you finally do take them out at night. But I’ve discovered a packing tip to help you. Read on and you’ll never forget your eyeglasses on vacation…maybe!
Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses. I’ve Googled around and can’t find the ad I KNOW I remember hearing/seeing back in the ’70’s that shamed near-sighted women. Maybe it was Bausch & Lomb as part of their advertising for contact lenses?
Without corrective lenses, I’m blind. Not squint-to-read-a-menu blind. I’m talking Mr. Magoo on a bad day. So my travel packing requires a contact lens case, solution and eyeglasses.
And sometimes they get forgot.
It’s annoying because I’ve really tried to get my act together when it comes to pre-packing my travel bath and beauty products.
Despite my best efforts, the glasses and contacts remain the things I throw in my bag at the last-minute because I can’t pack them until I’ve dressed the day of a trip. And sometimes they get left behind. And then there are unintended consequences.
Here’s What I Did When I Forgot My Glasses
Because it was an unplanned spree, I forgot the case, solution and eyeglasses on a getaway to the Jersey Shore. I didn’t realize, of course, until I was getting ready for bed well past an hour when I could roll myself back into the car and hunt down a still open pharmacy.
So I rigged a workaround for the contacts using tap water and the top to a Tylenol bottle (never, ever tell this to Dr. Weiss, my ophthalmologist). But I had to stumble around spectacle-less. Since I was staying in a boarding house with shared bathrooms in the hallway, there was potential for mayhem. All closed doors look alike, especially to the near blind. “Excuse me, sir. I thought this was the bathroom.” I made it through the night without embarrassing myself and kissed the linoleum floor in CVS the next morning.
The remedy, of course, would be purchasing a second set of glasses. However, when you are nearsighted to the nth degree, a pair of glasses cost about the same as a Nissan Versa.
However, I had my annual checkup and was not surprised to find out that I’d gotten blinder. Leaving the office, clutching my prescription, I decided to look at this as an opportunity, not another step towards the nursing home.
Why Having a Second Pair of Eyeglasses (Despite the Expense) Makes Sense
Usually I toss the new prescription in to the junk drawer and squint my way through because of the expense. However, my daughter recommended Warby Parker, the online eyeglass retailer as a source for inexpensive prescription eyeglasses, so I figured I’d give them a try. I picked out a bunch of frames to try on at home and found a pair that I thought made me look like an older (way older) Zooey Deschanel.
I mailed all of the frames back and completed an online order form, filling in the information from my prescription. A couple of days later, Warby Parker sent an email asking for a pupil measurement; I had to take a picture of myself, holding a card with a mag strip under my nose, and then measure the distance between my pupils. This is where I assumed the whole enterprise would fail, but, surprisingly, my glasses arrived a few days later. I can see clearly now and they only cost $125. Warby Parker for the win!
Forget Your Glasses on Vacation? Try This Tip!
When my new eyeglasses arrived, I put my old eyeglasses, a new contact lens case and a fresh bottle of contact lens solution into my pre-packed toiletry go bag, never to be forgotten again.
I’ve always wanted to say “I can be ready at a moment’s notice” and now I can…I think.