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In the late seventies I lived and worked in New York. My job took me all around the United States and Canada. So I like to go back occasionally; the last time being a couple of years ago with my soon to be wife Wendy. She had never been to New York so I worked up an itinerary to show her the highlights in just a few days. We also decided to drive to Washington DC and Boston.
In October 2016 we flew from southern England to Romania.
Romania is a big country by European standards and not one to see by public transport if time is limited. So to travel beyond Bucharest we hired a car and drove northwest to Brașov and on to Sighisiora, before looping southwest to Sibiu (European capital of culture 2007) and southeast through the Transylvanian Alps to Curtea de Arges on our way back to Bucharest.
Driving in Romania was interesting. There are some quite good motorways once out of the suburbs of Bucharest, where traffic lights are interminable trams rumble noisily, trolley-busses stop and start and progress can be slow. In the countryside road surfaces are variable and the roads mostly narrow. This does not slow the locals who seem to ignore speed limits making it necessary to keep up to avoid holding up traffic.
In 1960 the Russians shot down an American U-2 spy plane that was overflying and photographing their military bases. The U-2 Incident was big news when I was in High School and I remember it quite clearly.
The Incident forms the background to Bridge of Spies a 2015 movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance from a screenplay written by Matt Charman together with Ethan and Joel Coen that centres on these true events.
Spielberg and the Cohen Brothers. Who could miss it?
One night of at the end of March in 1979 we went to a party in Queens. Brenda, my first wife, is an artist and was painting and studying in New York. Our friends included many of the younger artists working in New York at the time. That day it had just been announced that there was a possible meltdown at a nuclear reactor at a place called a Three Mile Island , near Harrisburg Pennsylvania.
I was amazed that some people at the party were excitedly imagining that the scenario in the just released film ‘The China Syndrome’ was about to be realised; and thousands of people would be killed.