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My wife and I are going to fly from Madrid to NY soon.

We have a stuffed puppet we like to carry with us every time we travel. It is a small puppet, maybe 20cm tall. You can laugh as much as you want, but we REALLY love that puppet. We are a bit worried because if immigration find her (the puppet) suspicious because, for example, they suspect that can be stuffed with drugs or something similar instead of, well, stuff, and they tore her apart to see her insides, we are going to very very sad the rest of the travel. And is our honeymoon travel.

We want to take Filomena (that's the name of the puppet) with us because she has come with us all around the world, but if there is a risk that she is going to be broken by immigration officers we maybe want to leave her at home.

What is your advice? Put her in the handbag? in the luggage? Leave her at home?

You can see something similar to Filomena here:

Rat puppet

Volker Siegel
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2 Answers2

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Welcome to Travel StackExchange.

People travel with plushies all the time. A particularly high voted question for example deals with them, too.

I personally fly with a teddy bear (https://www.flickr.com/photos/chx/2744243832/ the one in the white hat) all the time. I am probably at 4-500 flights with this bear in the carry on ((hat tip: shoebags are even better than packing cubes for teddy bears, great fit, completely covered, light weight). It's a very well travelled, ancient (at my pillow side every night since 1988) teddy bear. When I immigrated I had my entire large carry on roller absolutely full with my bears. The last few years I had a tiny corgi keychain charm (pic) in my pocket, it helps a lot with the really bad experiences at security. Recently when I travelled to Hungary for a few months, Waffles the memory foam corgi (pic) was travelling in my checked in luggage, he is a bit large and heavy for carry on. The bond is not yet so strong that I wouldn't have been OK with just buying another one.

Noone cared about any of this, so far. The only negative experience was when israeli security lifted the poor, old bear by its ear. I didn't care about them strip searching me and rifling through every single item in my luggage but that made me raise my voice. Next time I told security to be a tiny bit careful. That went better.

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We are back from NYC to Madrid. We had no problem entering nor exiting in/from the USA, no one worried a little bit about Filomena, and not a single incident at customs.

We had a great time, and Filomena too...

enter image description here

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