It all started out rather humbly, as most hero’s journeys do. Sarah and I had been dating for a little while when we were invited out to go bowling with a colleague and some of his friends. It turned out that “some” friends was essentially an entire church congregation and since the bowling alley could not accommodate the massive group size we decided to grab Chinese food at a place down the block. The group was large enough that we spanned a number of large tables and somehow Sarah and I ended up at a table that didn’t include the one person we knew in the group, a great situation for a couple of introverts. Still, we muscled through it and at some point in the conversation it came up that there was some company that had an 800 number where one of the phone options was “Press X to hear a duck quack.” Someone there realized it was Aflac and my (now) wife knew the classic Gilbert Godfried duck voice “Aflac Aflac Aflaaaaac!”. Later that night, I googled Aflac to see what they did and saw that they sold a plush talking duck. I thought it was cute and that Sarah would love it, so I ordered it for her. She loved it (maybe the best money I’ve ever spent on a gift on a whim), declared his name to be Aflac, and we started bringing him with us when we traveled. When I took off on a road trip to see sites in Arizona and Utah, he came with me. Along the way, someone noticed me taking pictures of Aflac and offered to take one of Aflac and I together. I accepted and she asked, “Is that a traveling duck?”. “Why yes, yes he is.” Aflac has continued to come with us on our travels and we’ve taken a lot of pictures of him along the way.
Home of the travelling duck!
