Just got back from a trip to the old country and the Garmin HCX must not liked the humidity and came unglued from the sides. It didn't cause a failure of the unit but it is a month out of warranty. It was a awesome trip and it was a opportunist type eating. The first few days were rough eating plants, bread and some strange other things but as we arrived at my wife's moms house it improved substantially. I was eating through a set of steripen batteries a day with all the water intake, and recharged the ones not in use. Never got sick with the steripen and drank rain water and virus contaminated city water that they said don't drink unless you boil it. Bad way to experiment with the pen but when your thirsty you drink. No sickness with the steripen whatsoever and I drank out of a lot of questionable places, the water was clear for the pen to work. Anyway, here is a few of the 600 pictures I taken.
P.S. Don't take a laptop,MP3 player or phone through U.S. Customs unless you like them to copy everything..........






Dinner and alarm clock

The Steripen looks like a nice unit. I've almost purchased a Katadyn Vario filter, but i'm going to seriously consider the Steripen w/solar charging kit.

I've never seen such a thing on Garmin receivers. I presume you can take it back to your dealer (even if it's out of warranty) and try to explain. Or maybe speak with Garmin directly? The rubber sides on your pictures look different from those on my Legend HCx. They aren't "shiny" like yours... Are you sure yours weren't in contact with liquids such as bug repellent, oil or anything? Maybe this has something to do with them coming off.



I can't believe they're REALLY going to start doing this. Anyways... not the right thread to vent.


Sounds like you had a nice trip.

The only other thing I could think of is I used 100% Deet most of the time I was there but I did my best to keep it away from hands and equipment. My wives shoes also came unglued as well and she wasn't even around the DEET and some of the locals had said that some American products with certain types of glue come apart from that. So I'm not sure which is the case.

As for the steripen it's a good choice, I wouldn't recommend the solar charger unless you have several days to recharge a set of batteries. I would get a 20 watt or greater solar cell to recharge the batteries quickly. I use a 40 watt for mine.

And about TSA (stole my electric razor and bottle of wine on the way back,which I don't won't to go there) and customs who loves my picture collection so well for my camera that they took my sd card out of my camera and copied everything from that and my camcorder so that maybe if it get's erased, I can send them a little love note and they will send me archived copies. Bless there heart

Other than that it was a nice trip and I learned some customs/TSA tricks from a lot of travelers. It's amazing how quickly people change to work around security procedures so quickly.

Like you say, maybe a bad batch... You can possibly verify this with Garmin. Good luck, it's a great unit you got there, it's probably worth keeping and living with it, wether or not you can get it repaired.

Great pictures. Thanks for sharing. One thing about Garmin, best customer service in the business. Give them a call at 800-800-1020 and explain to them what happened. I'll bet they make it right.

Craig.

whats the story with the knife--a local job maybe??

I have had a number of plastic objects "eaten" by Deet. I always check my army bug spray and keep it as separate as possible from everything else. Never seen am eTrek's delaminate, but there is always a first time.

Nice Pics

Thanks SARbound and celler, hopefully they will cut me a deal on the repair.

CANOEDOGS, the knife was a knife that I picked at the airport at the store and it was very cheap and I was experimenting with bating it with a stick to see if it would fail. The little cheap knife did very good and never broke. I put the knife up there to demonstrate a point that you can acquire knifes and lighters most anywhere in the world regardless of airline restrictions. When I got off at the airport, they had zippo lighters and pocket knives in the store and all throughout town I could get a hold of pocket knives and machetes. The same goes through with places I've been like Mexico, Japan , Philippines, Portugal to name a few, so I've never been concerned with knives and lighters on aircraft because I usually reaquire them at the destination.

BruceZed, I will look into being a lot more careful with the DEET, I don't know if it caused this but I'm going to have to look more into the destructiveness on plastics it has, but I wouldn't trade DEET for all the money in the world, definitely good stuff.

Here is what I carried on me in cargo pant shorts every day while traveling.
I had navigation, signaling, fire, water and had my poncho (shelter)and paricord not to far behind.

Yea Izzy, that's why I'm wondering if the DEET was a root cause or not, I used it extensively while there. Another thing I realized was the mosquito net I had brought was to small for us and the next go around I am going with a much bigger mosquito net. (Lessons learned). I know realize you can never have a big enough mosquito net for sleeping.

great topic and travel advice