In about 1986, Jim and I traveled to Czechoslovakia which at that time was part of the Soviet Union.  I was presenting a talk at a plant science conference in a small university town.  We were quite stunned at what life was like behind the “Iron Curtain”.  I will confess that I had always thought that much of what we heard about Communism as it existed there was simply propaganda.  I was wrong.

When we left the conference, we traveled back to Vienna from Bratislava, a large city in Czechoslovakia only about 50 miles away.  Our trip was pretty amazing.  We were on a bus (only two ran per day) between these major cities but there were very few travelers on the bus.  When we arrived at the border, we had to cross into a “no man’s land” between two large metal fences topped with barbed wire.  There we were told to get off the bus under the watchful eyes of guards with machine guns in towers along the fence.  The bus under-carriage was searched with mirrors and the bus interior searched with dogs, both looking for stowaway Czech citizens.  The luggage of some passengers was searched.  Eventually we were allowed back on the bus and made our way without further difficulty to Vienna.

Needless to say it was a memorable experience.  It was so clear that there was something deeply wrong with a governmental system that had to work so hard to keep its citizens from leaving.

Today, we rode our bikes through that same border.  All that remains is the paltry gates you can see on either side of the bike trail

.  Next to it is a multilane highway, full of vehicles.  On the top of the gates, there are remnants of the barbed wire, now rusty and mainly broken away

.

It was wonderful to see that a bit of “wrong” in the world is now just a distant memory.