“The stuff that happens with him on Instagram, it’s always the kind of stuff you wouldn’t expect from an enormous reptilian fire-breathing monster,” Murray said. “His personality is quite the opposite of that. He’s a big softie. His favorite movie is Spy Kids, and he think Gremlins is the scariest.”

Murray purchased Godzilla from a comic book store in Chicago, Ill., on July 4, 2014 because he wanted a travel souvenir from the Windy City.

“Our eyes met across the room,” he explained. “And I went up to the clerk and said, ‘Oh my god, how much is that figurine?’ ” (Answer: $8.)

Later that night, while watching the fireworks with friends, Murray got the idea to hold Godzilla up to the skyline and take a picture. Though it’s not the first photo posted on their Instagram account, Murray credited it as the one “that sort of sparked the whole idea” to start a travelogue with the toy.

Surprisingly, Murray is not a Godzilla fan, and he has a hard time explaining why he ended up gravitating toward the figurine on that fateful Fourth of July.

“It just happened,” he said. “As a result, people assumed I was this Godzilla nut, but that’s really not the case at all. I’ve seen that late ’90s Godzilla movie, the one with Matthew Broderick in it, and I loved it. But that’s the only film I’ve ever seen of him.”

Regardless of why he picked the figurine, choosing Godzilla as his travel buddy has turned out to be a smart move. Murray unwittingly tapped into a large and hungry community of Godzilla fans on Instagram, and to date, @ryangodzilling has more than 14,500 followers.

“It’s really worked out well,”Murray said. “I picked a figurine that is popular, but also underrepresented online.”

Today, because he travels so much, he usually edits the photos while sitting in airports or airplanes, but in the early days, he wasn’t using Photoshop at all.

“It was just me literally holding him out in front of my iPhone,” he said. “And, since there’s only so many ways that you can take photos using that method — which basically means holding him by the tail and then poking him into the frame — that progressed into using the visual effects skills that I learned while in university.”

Murray spends anywhere from 30 minutes to four hours working on a single image, though his average time is about two hours. Some of the more challenging photos he’s created involved casting Godzilla’s shadow onto buildings or camouflaging him with background art, like the American flag or the geometric set in the music video to Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.”

Murray has no plans of ending his adventures with Godzilla any time soon, but he realizes that this decision might ultimately be out of his control anyways.

“People always ask me if I have backups of Godzilla, and I don’t. I only have this one,” he said. “So if I lose this thing, that’s the end of this Instagram.”

Click through the gallery below to see more travel photos of Godzilla: