Hard Rock Cafe Bears

I am a collector of Hard Rock Cafe bears. Right now I have around 50 of them with the latest being from Yokohama, Japan, where we visited before our Trans-Pacific cruise. Most of them are the standard Herrington bears but depending upon the country, there are different types. In Beijing, China, the bear is a stuffed panda bear and in Sydney, Australia, the bear is a koala bear. I have bears from places as Reykjavik, Iceland; Puerto Vallarta, Mexico; Niagara Falls, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, and Stockholm. I also have city bears from Louisville, KY, St. Louis, MO, Dublin, Ireland, and Chicago, IL.   They are displayed in a bookcase in my upstairs guest room.

Whenever we are in a place with a Hard Rock Cafe and are able to get to it, we go purchase a bear. In Stockholm, we walked many blocks to get to the Hard Rock Cafe. In Athens, we were disappointed that they didn't have the large bear for sale, so we had to get a smaller keyring bear (I got a full-sized bear from Athens later). In Destin, we visited the smallest Hard Rock Cafe in the world to get that bear. In Reykjavik, we found the Hard Rock Cafe by accident when we went into a mall there. In Beijing, we went by taxi with another fellow traveler who collects Hard Rock pins and were taken way out of our way by our taxi driver on the return trip. The concierge at our hotel recognized the driver and made him refund some of our fare because it was considerably more than the price we paid to go to the cafe.  I picked up four bears on our Western Mediterranean cruise (Rome, Malta, Lisbon, and Barcelona).  I also have them from Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, Orlando, Acapulco, Grand Cayman, Sydney, and other locations around the world.  I check Ebay periodically to see if I can find bears of cities which I have visited but did not get to the Hard Rock Cafe.

Fortunately the bears take being squashed in a suitcase quite well.

We don't always eat at the Hard Rock Cafes when we go to buy bears but I like collecting them because they do show the places we have been. I plan to buy bears whenever I can on our future trips wherever I can find a Hard Rock Cafe.