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    Gear Bear Adventures: As Told by Gear Bear
    Gear Bear Adventures: As Told by Gear Bear
    Gear Bear Adventures: As Told by Gear Bear
    Ebook123 pages1 hour

    Gear Bear Adventures: As Told by Gear Bear

    By L. A. Symons

    ()

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    About this ebook

    My name is Gear Bear (and for the record, Gear rhymes with Bear). I am a small, brown bear who has had the opportunity and pleasure of great travel, and these are my stories.



    I am a very lucky bear for so many reasons. I get to travel just about everywhere my friends and family gobut sometimes they get so excited about being someplace new that they leave me behind, forget me, or lose me. Ive even been bearnapped! But no matter what happens, I am always ready for a new adventure.



    I have a lot of miles under my belt and many stamps in my passport. Ive traveled on a canoe down the Wisconsin Riverthrough a nude beach, no lesson the back of a motorcycle to the Sturgis Bike Rally, and on the back of a horse through the Ozark Mountains. Ive even had a ghost encounter at a local establishment and a search-and-rescue mission with the help of a US Marshal!



    Ive traveled by plane, train, and automobile, and more. It seems that no matter where I go or what I do, trouble and adventure seem to follow.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateSep 5, 2013
    ISBN9781491701881
    Gear Bear Adventures: As Told by Gear Bear
    Author

    L. A. Symons

    L. A. Symons enjoys the flexibility to travel afforded her after thirty years with her accounting business. She enjoys volunteering, creating stained glass, riding horses, blogging, and traveling. She currently lives in northern Illinois.

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      Book preview

      Gear Bear Adventures - L. A. Symons

      Copyright © 2013 by L. A. Symons.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

      iUniverse LLC

      1663 Liberty Drive

      Bloomington, IN 47403

      www.iuniverse.com

      1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

      Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

      ISBN: 978-1-4917-0186-7 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4917-0187-4 (hc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4917-0188-1 (ebk)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2013913899

      iUniverse rev. date: 08/28/2013

      Contents

      Acknowledgments

      Prologue

      I’ll Start at the Beginning, 1992

      Background Check

      You Won’t Get Wet—We Promise!

      Family Night

      In My Opinion

      All Bears Bulletin

      Buckaroos

      Little Children and Da Bear

      Graduation Day

      Denver in December

      Who Gave the Kid a Slingshot?

      Da Bear in Omaha

      Born to be Wild!

      Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

      Hotel Security Alert

      Winning at Slot Machines

      or Maybe Not!

      Da Bear Got Lucky in Vegas

      Delayed Flight?

      Robbery in Progress

      ’Twas the First Day of Shopping!

      Riding the Dessert Train

      Old Smoky

      The Old Bowl

      ’Tis the Season

      Proper Attire Is Required

      A Stick Horse

      I Sure Spend a Lot

      of Time in the Water

      Who’s Afraid of Them Ghosts!

      Road Trip Flush

      I’m Calling Shotgun

      Savannah, Second Time Around

      How Often Are We Short-Changed?

      Our Christmas Angel

      Follow the mighty adventures of a small

      but powerful brown bear

      named Gear Bear.

      To my family and friends for putting up with me as I hauled Gear Bear everywhere we have been for the past twenty-one years and neither complaining nor telling me I was insane. I am sure they thought it though!

      Acknowledgments

      I would like to thank all the people who have treated Gear Bear as one of the family.

      In addition, I would like to thank the store owners, security personnel, the US Marshal Service, Oklahoma state troopers, the Tunica, Mississippi Sheriff’s Department, American Airlines, tour guides, the folks at Cross Country Trail Ride, and everyone who took the time to have a photo or two taken with Gear Bear and share their stories with me.

      But most of all, thank you to my loving family and to everyone who has met Gear Bear, thanks for having such great sense of humor!

      Prologue

      Let me introduce myself. I am a small brown bear that has had the pleasurable opportunity to travel just about everywhere my friends and family have gone. (That is if they didn’t leave me behind, forget me, or lose me.)

      Because I am always ready for a new adventure, I have even had the chance to travel with my family’s friends and share their adventures or, more often than not, their misadventures.

      I hope you enjoy reading my stories as much as I enjoy telling them.

      I%27ll%20start%20at%20the%20Beginning%20copy.jpg

      I’ll Start at the Beginning, 1992

      The earliest memory I have as a young bear cub is being unwrapped from white tissue paper while being flown on a big airplane to an unknown destination. As the tissue was slowly removed, I looked up and saw a pair of bright blue eyes staring back into my little brown peeps.

      To tell you the truth, the attention scared the heck out of me. Had I been bear-napped? Bought on the black market? I did not know, but as everything turned out, I was about to start a wonderful, adventurous life with a very loving family: Paula, the blue-eyed matriarch, and the rest of her clan.

      In order to understand how I became a constant traveling companion, it might be best if I told you about a friend of mine, Flat Stanley. In case you have not heard of him, Flat Stanley is a character in a book written by Jeff Brown in 1964. The story involves Stanley and his brother, Arthur, and tells us how Stanley became flat. Because of his skinniness, Stanley is able to travel the world by way of an envelope and a postage stamp.

      In 1994, schools began a Flat Stanley project that allowed children in primary grades to create and send a paper version of Stanley to friends and relatives around the world. When their Flat Stanleys returned, the children wrote stories about his adventures.

      I’m not as tall as my friend Stan. But, if I stand on my tippy toes, I might be able to reach the nine-inch mark on a ruler. I’m also not nearly as skinny as Flat Stanley. This means I have to travel by more conventional methods than through the mail. And travel I have!

      Thanks to Paula and her family and friends for taking me wherever they go, I have many

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