A couple of years ago I signed myself up for a charity rally between the UK and Mongolia. At the time I was much, much wealthier than I am now (i.e. I had a few quid, and now I don’t), so a few months before I set off on the trip I spent a few grand getting my eyes fixed with laser surgery. I didn’t fancy the idea of fiddling with contact lenses with oil covered hands in the middle of a sandstorm, so despite my abject terror I took the plunge.
Did it work? Well, kind of. My vision was perfect, but I fell into that vanishingly small percentage of patients who suffer unpleasant side effects from the laser. In the months following the surgery I noticed that I’d become photophobic – extremely sensitive to light. I found it difficult to drive on sunny days. The glare from the sun really screwed with my vision, and after a few close calls I had to stop driving for a while.
After a hell of a lot of worry – I was due to drive 10,000 miles across the world a month or so later – the solution presented itself. I bought a pair of the best polarized shooting glasses I could find, and my problem was gone. Simple.
Shooting glasses are designed, as you may have guessed from the name, for hunters and marksmen. They’re a step up from regular sunglasses in that, not only do they offer great glare protection, but they’re also designed to surpass the ANSI Z87.1 impact standard. That means that a pair of shooting glasses can take a ricochet or an impact from an ejected shell without shattering.
My Allen Company shooting glasses can take an impact from a 1.1lb object dropped from a height of 50 inches without cracking, which is a feature that comes in damned handy when you need a pair of sunglasses to survive a trip across the world.
Today, three years after I made that trip across the world, I’ve still got the same pair – and they’re still in great condition. Since day one they’ve been with me on a 50 day trek to Mongolia, a three month driving tour of the US, four months diving in Thailand, up to 15,000 feet in Tajikistan and across much of China on foot. As I write this, in a hotel room in Beijing, my glasses are sitting beside my laptop without a scratch. Not bad, for $25.
