The Adventure Begins

Hi, my name is Bitsy. Actually, my name is Bitsy the Adventurous Arachnid, but since that can be hard for people to say a lot, I just go by Bitsy for short. It's easy to remember, too, because my parents named me after the great Itsy Bitsy. He's looked up to by spiders everywhere, because he climbed the waterspout.

I live with a human named Riley. He doesn't know that I exist, though. You see, spiders and humans don't always get along, especially when spiders are as big as I am. He does have 3 little girls that DO like me, though. And they like him, too. Riley had to go away to a country called Afghanistan for a few months to help some people there. And since his little girls like him so much, they asked me to tag along, to keep an eye on him and watch out for him.

A couple of days ago Riley packed his bag and took a bus to the airport to leave. While he was saying goodbye to his family, I sneaked into the bag.

We rode 3 airplanes in one day. They took us all the way across the county and then all the way across the ocean. We then flew over a bunch more countries and landed in a big city called Dubai. The weather got bad along the way, so when we landed in Dubai, we were too late for our next flight. That meant that Riley and I would have to wait in Dubai for a day or two until the next airplane could take us the rest of the way to Afghanistan. 

I've never been to Afghanistan before. Actually, I've never left the country before. Well...to be honest, the farthest I'd traveled before this adventure was out in my family's backyard to spin cobwebs in their tool-shed. Cobwebs make humans shout and do all sorts of Karate moves when they walk into them, and I love Karate.

Anyway, in order to check on our next flight, we had to get up really early. We got up at four o'clock. While Riley was taking a shower, I snoozed a bit more. The alarm scared me right awake when it went off again at 4:10. I quickly turned it off and climbed back into Riley's bag.

We went to the airport and found out that the flight today was already full. We would have to stay in Dubai for at least another day. For some reason, Riley didn't seem upset. In fact, he seemed kind of glad.

Once it got light outside, we found a big bus. The bus was giving something called a tour of the city. I'm not sure what a tour is, but we sure drove around a lot and looked at a bunch of things. It was kind of exhausting.

We saw a great big building that the bus driver called the Burj Khalifa. He kept interrupting the tour to tell the people on the bus that it was the tallest building in the whole world and that it is almost as tall as two entire Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other. I don't know what an Empire State Building is, but I'm guessing it's pretty tall. But only half as tall as the Burj Khalifa. Eventually the bus driver stopped interrupting our tour with his talking and kept driving. Come to think of it, he never did explain what a tour is.

After we stopped the tour, Riley saw a black car. He said that it's called a Maserati and that it's really cool and pretty. He walked up to it and pretended to touch it. He didn't actually touch it, though. He said it was because he didn't want to hurt it. I like the Maserati because it's black, like a black widow. I'm not supposed to touch black widows either, but that's because they can hurt me, not the other way around.

After we pretended to touch the black widow car, we stopped at a restaurant to eat. It was called the Hard Rock Cafe. I don't understand why it's called that, because I couldn't see any rocks around it. Mostly, there was just sand.

The food was pretty good, too. I thought that maybe there'd be rocks in the food, but there weren't. Someone did stick a toothpick in my sandwich though. I asked for a pork sandwich, but the waiter said no. He said that in Dubai they eat lamb sandwiches instead of pork. I told him that was weird. He then told me that he thought a spider eating a sandwich was weird. So I told him that I thought that it was weird to name a restaurant after a rock when there were no rocks in it. He just laughed and walked away.

During lunch Riley told the waiter that he didn't think that the music by a Korean guy named Psy was rock. I thought it was obvious that Psy doesn't make rocks. I'm pretty sure he doesn't make music either.

After dinner we went to a grocery store. Inside, Riley found some Camel's Milk. He thought about buying it, but bought something called Bitter Lemon instead.

Outside the store, we found a blue camel. I climbed up on her and asked if she knew about the camel's milk that was inside the store. She wouldn't answer me and was holding really still. Maybe she was hoping people wouldn't notice her and take her milk.

Since the camel wouldn't talk to me I climbed down and went back to the hotel. It was getting late and I decided to go back to bed. I'd have to get up again at four o'clock. And I didn't want to sleep in again.