Gordon Barlow

It doesn't have to be "long ago"; that's just when Linda and I were there. (Linda was a girl who hitched a ride with me and my Beetle in Greece in 1964, and was still with me in Russia the next year. We married in Canada in '67.) Our travel in Russia was not the least bit adventurous, although being there at all was fairly adventurous in those days. We drove from Finland down to Moscow on the main road, slept a few nights at the official camping ground outside the city, then headed west to what is now Belarus, and on to Poland. One incident I remember is driving around Moscow after dark - one of very few cars venturing out at that time - and running extremely low on petrol. Not a petrol station to be seen, and I had no map to find one. In desperation I flagged down a garbage truck and explained my problem in fluent Russian - NOT!! Sign-language and my 800-word dictionary got the message across, though. He didn't know where the nearest petrol shop was, but he offered to siphon petrol from his vehicle to mine. I only wanted enough to get back to the camping ground, but he insisted on filling my tank right to the top, and would have given me more, if I'd had something to carry it in!