If you wear prescription glasses or sunglasses on backpacking trips, you need to take extra care to ensure you don’t roll over them at night and smash them to bits. I’ve done it. While you can keep them safe by wearing them during the day, storing them safely at night in your tent or even in your backpack is difficult unless you’re willing to carry a crush-resistant case. Ounce and gram-counters that we are, it can be difficult to find a lightweight case that provides adequate protection while minimizing gear weight. It took me years.

I stumbled onto a good solution to this dilemma several years ago when I bought prescription glasses at Walmart. The glasses sucked, but the plastic glasses cases they give you with each pair work very well. Each one weighs 1.9 oz/56g, and their blue color makes them easy to keep track of.  The cases are lightly lined inside to prevent scratches on the lenses and muffle any sounds when you walk. The top lid snaps shut and stays shut even when they’re packed away in your backpack and get jostled with your other gear.

While Walmart will give you a blue case if you buy your glasses in its optical department, it doesn’t appear to sell them elsewhere in the store. In fact, I’ve only been able to find them on eBay for as little as $5 each and nowhere else. If you’ve purchased a pair of glasses at Walmart, you can, and I have, gone into my Walmart store and requested “replacement” cases from them, which they were quite happy to provide. Otherwise, try eBay.

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