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We had to wait 24 hours. We fell sound asleep the minute we got back to the hotel.

That night, since we were stuck there, we decided to go to a movie. We had to call up and get somebody to explain the movie to us, because Mina was just as helpless there as we were. The captions were in Georgian. I'll never forget the woman explaining the movie to us. She would read the caption out loud to us in Georgian and when she was finished she would say, “Ah, hah!" And we'd wait. Nothing. About the third time when she read the caption in Georgian and went “Ah, hah!" we gave up!

Now, we got to Ordzhonikidge, and who was waiting for us, furious that we were a whole day late, but Walter Durante, the Times correspondent. We had written ahead, so he came down from Moscow to pay his respects.

Our next stop was Rostov. We were learning about Russia really--the people. We were heading for the big collective farm that they wanted to show us, and this meant crossing the wide Volga River via a big suspension bridge. We had to leave at 8 in the morning. We rode about three blocks and found the bridge open. Traffic was backed up for about two blocks with nobody paying the slightest attention--drivers asleep in their trucks and chatting, laughing and eating. We sat there for about 15 minutes, then wandered down to the river. There wasn't a boat in sight. The bridge was open. The bridge operator just hadn't bothered to close it. So we started screaming, “Close the bridge!" Nobody else gave a damn. Can