Taunton Deane District

After a fair amount of research last night, I found a Curry's approximately 15 minutes away in Taunton that claimed to have a charger. So, after our breakfast (still digesting) we drove into Taunton. Curry's did not have any camera chargers.

Next door to the Curry's was an office supply store. They sold many things; camera chargers were not among them.

At this point, I had started becoming despondent, so we went into a coffee shop in the same shopping center to steal their wifi and recaffeinate (but mostly the wifi) while attempting to find other potential solutions. We found chargers on the website for London Camera Exchange, for more money than either of us wanted to spend. We called to confirm the chargers actually existed since the hurt of the Curry's incident was still fresh. No one answered the phone at London Camera Exchange. We called the Ilminster camera shop which, as it turns out, went out of business years ago and the phone number now belongs to a private individual. Oops. We discussed the possibility of trying to get Amazon Prime to deliver one, but the logistics of that attempt seemed tricky considering the whole "not spending more than two nights in one place" thing. On a whim, we popped into ASDA. ASDA did not have any camera chargers.

We took a break from the search to go to lunch with Will's family, during which time we talked about the severe lack of camera supply stores outside of the larger cities. No kidding.

After lunch, we called London Camera Exchange once again. They still did not answer the phone. We went anyway. (If you examine the travel map, you will see Donyatt and Taunton connected by four lines. That is two round trips just to replace my flipping camera charger.) After several wrong turns and an adventure through a back alley that DEFINITELY does double duty as a urinal, we found London Camera Exchange company. The store did exist and they did have chargers.

The shopkeeper apologetically explained that they were universal chargers, and would therefore charge many more batteries than the one specifically for my camera. He put my camera battery into the charger and even more apologetically explained that the blinking red light we were seeing indicated that the battery was, in fact, charging. He looked positively pained when explaining that the price of the charger was half of the price we had seen online. Confused, but excited, we agreed to buy the charger. I had to restrain myself from hugging the man. I don't think he would have appreciated it...

I'm sure there's a moral here somewhere, but I can't really think of one. The most relevant tidbit I can come up with is this: even when faced with the idea that my camera had become a very expensive paper weight, I remained more calm than Will did when he accidentally dumped the contents of his suitcase all over my living room on Monday. My situation was arguably more tragic, but I handled it with significantly more grace. So there's your moral.

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