Hi, this is Kelly McEvers, and you have reached the Atlas Obscura podcast line.

I'm not home right now, but please leave me a message about a time you accidentally broke the rules while traveling after the beep.

Hey, Atlas Obscira. My name is Mike. I'm going to tell you a story about when I almost committed an international crime when I was a teenager.

Back in high school, I went on a school trip from my school in the United States over to Germany,

and we traveled around to different towns and cities, learning about the history and the culture, visiting the cathedrals and the castles.

And at one of those locations, I found some really cool frogs.

Now, granted, these weren't anything special. I think if I look back on it, they were probably just the regular common toad that was very common in Europe,

and there were some frogs very well,

and they had some eggs that eggs that they had laid in the pond.

Now, when I was a kid, I loved collecting frogs and frog eggs and raising them, raising the tadpoles up.

I still do enjoy that every now and then.

So I thought, hey, it would be so cool to take home these frog eggs back to the States and raise some European amphibians.

I was dumb enough to think it was a good idea, but I was smart enough to know that it's absolutely not legal.

So I was like, how can I get around security and customs?

How will I be able to get these through without them discovering that I have these

live animals in my luggage? I thought, hey, I'm going to put them in a small little shampoo container,

emptyed out, washed out. Maybe they'll just think it's a face scrub or weird looking shampoo and they'll let it pass.

So I have it all packed up, I had my plan ready to go, I didn't tell anybody else on the trip.

As we're on the train, we're getting to the last stop before the airport to go home.

And I decided, you know, this is a bad idea. I'm not going to do it. I put the little frog eggs in the little container in the train station with a little sign that said frog eggs in German and hoped that somebody would pick them up and take them home. I'm really glad that I didn't go through all the way with the plan because that absolutely would have led to some kind of terrible charge against me or my school, my parents, whatever that was.

And obviously, animal trafficking is a terrible thing. It's needing to the demise of many amphibian species.

I'm really glad I didn't do it.

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