Blue Monkey Used San Francisco as Springboard to World Tour

This is Wilbert, everyone. He's a a three-haired, yellow-bellied, stuffed monkey who started his world travels in San Francisco on May 4, 2008. Since then, he's hit up Paris, Jamaica, New York City, Toronto, Vegas, Tokyo, the Amazon, Rio De Janeiro, China, Greece, Oklahoma, Montreal, Aruba, Idaho, Santa Cruz, Vancouver, Dallas, Florida, the Virgin Islands, Utah, Boston, Phoenix, South Korea, Hawaii, Peru, Maine, Amsterdam, Santa Rosa, Chicago...and I think that'll do. There are photographs to prove all this.

 The project, called Cruising Wilbert, is the not particularly original brainchild of Keith DeVey (cheesily pictured above), a 24-year-old who works at a phone company in San Jose. But somehow, even though we've all seen what Amelie did to her father's garden gnome, and the subsequent $80 million dollar Travelosity "Roaming Gnome" ad campaign, and some of us even remember the picaresque adventures of the garden gnome in the phenomenal 1994 flick, Threesome, this traveling ape still manages to appeal to some basic human desire to behold the journies of inanimate objects.

Wilbert has been in the possession of DeVey's trusted friends and family members for the past nine months, traveling for a maximum of seven days with any invididual. He took a short vacation from vacations at Christmas, and soon he'll be tested out in the hands of reliable-seeming strangers. Good luck, Wilbert. If you get raped or kidnapped, we will always remember you sitting high above Rio, your three hairs not quite blowing in the wind.