Garibaldi - Adventures of a soft toy spider!

by Peter Emery (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

Making a local connection New Zealand

It's amazing how a yellow smiley faced soft toy spider can become like a member of the family and your closest travel companion. My cheeky smiling spider with mesmerising eyes, Garibaldi, named after the biscuits and not the Italian ruler, travelled over 400,000 miles in 2019 alone, albeit thanks to my job as cabin crew. He has become a miniature cult figure in his own right from his birth in 2015, after the surprise gift from a friend before I embarked on my travels to New Zealand. He swiftly had an Instagram account created for himself by my friends in North Carolina to plot his movements. Since then he has circumvented half the globe... Yes of course by my side, travelling by train across the US and Canada, spending 18 months in NZ, before becoming an extra crew member on multiple British Airways flights and taken a whistle stop tour of Europe. Yes, this probably from the outside looks rather odd at best, and slightly worrying that my photo album is full of a soft toy and very few of myself! However, in my defence, I have on my travels seen a travelling elf and a waving "Her Majesty the Queen" figurine as well as a miniature mini car - all with quite a following. Perhaps even more disturbing or endearing depending on how you look at it is his priceless value to my world, which has become evident when he has been lost and thankfully returned to me (on multiple occasions!), mainly during my travels around New Zealand. From the despair of thinking he had fallen off a catamaran off of Great Barrier Island, NZ but instead hidden in a so called friends' bag (a cruel prank by the way) to an anxious 30 min drive back after leaving him on a windy, secluded beach in Wellington. Followed by a desperate plea in Queenstown, NZ Facebook page (thousands of members) after leaving him on roof of my car and driving off. Only to receive an almost instant reply back of him posing by a fire with a glass of wine having been renamed "Wilson" after the bay he was found in. To filing a missing report after realising I had lost him at top of Grouse Mountain, Vancouver, only to turn around from my place at the desk to see his cheeky smile staring at me from the cafe coffee station! And to another desperate plea on the British Airways internal staff page after leaving him on the plane I had just flown out to Orlando. (He became a stowaway back to London and thankfully returned back to Orlando the next night)! He has sure had his own adventures and probably many more to come... thankfully this precious cargo has always returned to me. Perhaps taking a mascot, a lucky charm, or a travel buddy is not a craze to take the world by storm but in a strange roundabout way can create unexpected connections and adventures! I am guessing there may well be many more travel buddies out there with many travel stories to tell... IG: Adventuresofgaribaldi