Is it possible to load a view that requires a user id, without determining it in the URI in Laravel 5.1

I'm continuing my adventure with Laravel 5.1. I have a small project I'm working on and I'm looking to find a nice way to load a User's gecko ideally without having the user id in the URI.

This is my current URI which works as it is:

Route::get('gecko/{user_id}/{name}', 'GeckoController@show');

As you can see i'm holding the user id in the URI and then i'm querying it to find the right gecko. As shown below:

public function show($user_id, $name)
{
    $name = str_replace('-', ' ', $name);

    $gecko = Gecko::where(compact('user_id', 'name'))->first();

    return view('gecko.show', compact('gecko'));
}

So to get this to work, I would do http://ift.tt/1RefB7G - It works, but having the User ID in there kind of sucks. I decided that having the User ID was important in case there were multiple users who have geckos with the same name.

Any help on this is greatly appreciated, and if you need any extra code let me know :)

Andy

via Chebli Mohamed