The Wrong Kind of Double Exposure

By 1991, DW and I (who were only dating at the time) had travelled enough together and knew that we were very good companions. We had already been to New York City, Florida, Toronto, Quebec City, and around the Gaspé Peninsula, so we had a good feeling that we'd do all right on an overseas trip.

When we decided to travel to London, to visit DW's best friend, who was there on a work visa, we also made plans to see other parts of England and venture across Wales before flying over to Paris to visit DW's sister, who lived there.

This May will mark 30 years since that adventure, and DW and I have been discussing it a lot these days, mostly due to the fact that I'm virtually trekking across England with my Conqueror Virtual Challenges and I've been revisiting some places where I've actually been. And what DW and I have been learning is that a lot of this vacation is only coming back to us in foggy snippets.

For example, we remember sharing a room in a youth hostel with DW's friend, Catheleen, and her boyfriend (who came with DW and me from Canada), Joel, in London, but we can only remember a few of the city's tourist attractions that we visited: Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, Tower Bridge and the Tower of London. I remember going to a fabulous Italian restaurant in the Elephant & Castle neighbourhood, and I think we enjoyed one of the few sunny days in Hyde Park.

But that's pretty much it. After about three days in London, DW and I rented a car and set out to explore the countryside.

To help me remember more parts of this trip, I've gone through DW's and my photo albums, which were buried in the abyss of our basement. After dusting them off, I began scanning the slides that I shot and some of the print photos that both of us took. And in viewing these old prints, I remembered a major blunder that I had made when we were in Wales.

Typically, when I used up a roll of 35mm film, I would wind the film back into its cannister, listening closely to the mechanism as I got near to the beginning of the roll. I liked to keep the tabs sticking out just a centimeter or so, to make it easier for the folks who processed the roll to get at the film.

Having worked in a camera store, I knew that there was a small risk, in the attempt to fish the tab from within the cannister, of either tearing the film or spreading the opening too much and partially exposing the film to light.

With the tab sticking out, I'd bend it so that it was obvious that the roll had already been used.

But something must have gone wrong one day in Caernarfon, Wales: either I had failed to mark a roll of film as being used or I wasn't paying enough attention when I loaded a roll. The outcome was that I used a roll of film twice.

The error, of course, wasn't noticed until DW and I were back in Canada and had the roll developed.

A Big Ben, Caernarfon Castle mashup.

As a result, all of our photos in London were ruined. Some of our photos of various castles in Wales were also ruined. I totally screwed up.

Starting Thursday, I'm going to share some of that 1991 trip, though I will spare you and not go through a day-by-day account, as I have done in so many other posts of our travels. Instead, I'll stick to highlights: some of the major attractions and some memories that DW and I still laugh about to this day.

Stay tuned.