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Gord Turner: What you bring home from travel

We were looking for that one-of-a-kind souvenir to put on a shelf or a wall when we arrived home.
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I remember the first time we travelled abroad and did some heavy touring.

Always, we were looking for that one-of-a-kind souvenir to put on a shelf or a wall when we arrived home to signal we’d been there. Most of our friends do exactly the same, and after travelling extensively, they end up with quite a bit of bric-a-brac.

On our first real trip to the United States, we explored three states, and so we wanted a memento from each state. When we found a souvenir plate emblazoned with “California,” we shouted, “Eureka.” We bought it immediately and then determined to pick up similar plates in the other two states — which we did.

Thereafter, whenever we travelled to a new state, be it Hawaii or Montana, we looked for these coloured plates with the state names on them and usually we had no difficulty finding them.

One day after about 10 years of collecting, we looked at these plates and wondered why we were collecting such garish-looking objects. On the wall of our home, these plates were cheap-looking and not very special. They were reminders, of course, of our travels, but what we bought 10 years ago had little to do with our interests now. So, we decided to take them to a second-hand store.

Traveling to various sites with a college colleague, I picked up a new souvenir-collection habit. He would look for a tiny item in some out-of-the-way location, and when he returned home with it, he placed it on his personal-travel mantelpiece. If there were 200 of these items in a store, or if several stores had similar items, he would never buy it. He would only buy the item as a souvenir if he could talk a shopkeeper or an artist into looking into the back of the shop or digging deeper into their boxes or baskets. And the curio had to be no more than two or three inches tall.

So I started doing the same. I remember both of us wandering the streets of an American Indian village in Utah until each of us found a tiny piece of pottery like no other. Sure the tiny vase cost us $25 apiece, but then and since then, I’ve never seen their like.

I’ve purchased a labelled, brass Queen Victoria harness attachment from a place in Cornwall, England. I have a brass three-inch unicorn that stood out in a shop at Cashmere near Wenatchee, Wash. Another tiny souvenir of interest is a metallic Buddha in gold-leaf colouring from Japan. I’m also quite fond of the miniature Aladdin’s lamp I discovered in a market in Istanbul, Turkey. It includes a tiny chain and cap, which comes apart so you can add oil if you wish.

Nearby on that shelf is a half-inch piece of emerald-glass with three tiny quarter-inch silvery people on top. I picked this trinket up somewhere in Arizona. Close to it is a tiny golf club with its thin envelope opener shaft, which I received as a gift. However, the oh-so-tiny souvenir I admire the most is a glass mallard duck with an orange body and a green head that my wife bought for me.

We had visited the famous Peabody Hotel in Memphis where the hotel had been holding a twice-daily duck-march ceremony for many years. The ducks were brought down from their hotel roof-top cages via elevator. When they waddled onto a red carpet and across the hotel lobby to an inside pool and swam around for awhile, the tourists went crazy and I ended up with a miniature mallard.