I can still remember when, as a child, my school would conduct the occasional air raid drill. I don’t know if it was common throughout the country or whether our proximity to our nation’s capital caused our schools to take the precautions.

I also remember the first time I saw an underground bomb shelter for sale in the parking lot of a nearby shopping center. Presumably a homeowner could arrange for the shelter, an enclosed metal box with a pipe for ventilation protruding from the top, to be buried in their back yard so that the family could take refuge below ground in the event of a nuclear holocaust. I suppose they would survive by remaining inside until the fireworks were over. They could later emerge to see what was left of the world.

I joined the National Security Agency (NSA) at Ft. Meade, Maryland a few months before the Bay of Pigs disaster, where Fidel Castro defeated a group who attempted to overthrow his communist government. More than a year later, Nikita Khrushchev, in an effort to dissuade the United States from trying to rid the island of communism, attempted to install nuclear missiles in Cuba, which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis – purportedly the closest the USA and the Soviet Union came to “Mutually Assured Destruction”.

How things have changed. As a young man beginning what turned out to be a six-year career with NSA (my first job after graduating from high school) I never imagined that I would have the opportunity (or reason) to head to Moscow 50 years later. I also could not have foreseen that I would introduce so many Russian visitors to the American Southwest (by motorcycle, no less) or that my Russian friends would be encouraging me to visit their country to offer motorcycle tours to Americans.

My experience in coming to know my Russian friends has been an unexpected and very pleasant surprise. One of the things that I learned about them during my first visit with them was that they are curious and very interested in our way of life and our culture. It’s reciprocal. I always find it interesting to visit a new part of the world – especially if it’s an area that I expect to be significantly different from mine. I’m now in the air, on my way to Moscow, and am looking forward to the next few weeks with the sort of anticipation that I must have felt as a young Boy Scout, heading for summer camp for the first time.