Not too long after we got my hubby his scooter we were T-boned. The passenger side of the car was crumpled in, all of the air bags deployed and I ended up with a couple of broken ribs and a bruise on my thigh the size of a basketball as well as bent frames on my glasses. The car was a write off and since it was an older vehicle we didn't carry collision insurance on it.
Hubby was shaken up and ached all over, but otherwise unhurt. Initially all I felt was the impact to my leg, and when we were asked by the paramedics if we needed to go to the hospital, we both declined. The driver and passengers of the other car were likewise shaken up but not seriously injured.
I noticed the next day that I was having trouble taking a deep breath and I figured that my ribs were bruised or possibly fractured and knowing that even if they were broken, nothing could be done until they healed on their own, I wasn't too worried. However, every time I coughed or sneezed, the unexpected pain made me yelp so my, ever solicitous honey, insisted on calling the doctor, who sent me for x-rays. Yup. Broken ribs. Thus ended out scooter rides for a while.
That really bummed me out because scooters don't put any pressure on ribs! My honey wasn't taking chances, so I got to sit and do nothing. For days! I was going stir crazy.
The enforced inactivity was good for one thing. It left a lot of computer time to search out used cars. We had been thinking of buying a new electric or hybrid vehicle, but after some investigation, decided to go with gas. The Impala we had been driving gave my tall hubby lots of leg room, and lots of power for passing on the highway, so we were looking for something similar. My family is mostly in Toronto and his is mostly in Windsor, which means lots of highway driving. After looking at the specs on thousands of cars, we finally bought a 2011 Chev Malibu.
Sixteen days after the accident we had wheels again, and hubby immediately bought me my own TurboAnt because my old scooter couldn't keep up with him.
While waiting for our new (used) car we received our order for a small wearable camera. It's hard to take pictures of what we see on our scooter rides because by the time you realize there'd a family of ducks waddling along the trail and get your camera out, they've already flown away or you've zipped by and missed them.
We tried it out clipped onto a t-shirt, but it flopped around a lot and mostly took pictures of the road. So hubby added a fixed position mount onto the top of an old ball cap, which worked really well.
There were some problems though, like pink leaves that were actually green.
Also, every wobble of the scooter or the camera resulted in headache producing bouncing as the camera was jostled up and down. The files created were huge, and running stabilization software took forever and produced an on again off again black border in places. That was fixed by adding a black frame around the video. Each one of the changes took huge amounts of time to adjust for the camera's limitations.
Part of the reason for doing these videos was so that hubby's brother, who has MS and can barely get out of bed, let alone get out of the house, could get to join us on our scooter rides and enjoy some of the sights and sounds of summer. So we bit the bullet, and ordered a GoPro camera.
AMAZING!
No pink leaves, no wobble when going over broken pavement, no bouncing up and down over speed bumps. Just steady, level, images with decent quality even on the lowest resolution.
Here's a link to a short, speeded up video so you can see for yourself:
1 comment:
Goodness, sorry about your car accident. Camera looks just the thing. Worth trying a lesser version, but it sounds like it had too many negatives!
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