First visit to Prague, 1993. Met a French journalist on the train there from Budapest who was also traveling alone. She and I decided to pool our effort and travel together. We get off the train and was met by a woman who asked if we needed a place to stay. We did.

Czech woman leads us to a waiting car. Front license plates were issued in New York. What? We get in, so does she and a man drives us to an outlying suburb to a well kept multi story home. We are assigned the comfy attic that had a half dozen single beds with down duvets.

As we had arrived in the morning, we were offered breakfast. We sit in the kitchen and chat with the man who drove the car with NY tags, which I asked him about. It seems about 10 or so years prior, he was on a joint maneuver with the Czechoslovak army in East Germany near the

West Germany border. Spontaneously, he decided to make a run for the border when he wasn’t being monitored. Lucky for him, he wasn’t detected leaving and made it safely to West Germany. After spending time there with interviews from the military there, he reached out to relatives

in New York City. They made arrangements to travel there where he remained, working menial jobs for several years, saving his money, and all the time wanting to go back someday. In 1989, opportunity knocked when the authoritarian governments collapsed in eastern and central

Europe. He took the money he saved and went back and bought that nice house in the Prague suburb, turned it into a B&B and bought a new car and slapped a New York State license plate.

The End.

Correction: This was in October 1992, not 1993.

And addendum: The journalist and I were walking around the Castle Hill government complex surrounding St Vitus Cathedral. We saw the president’s office, who at the time was Vaclav Havel.

Being a journo who loves to ask questions she said let’s go in and see if he is there. We did, asked if the president was there. The head office admin apologized, he was out but would be back later in the day some time. (We didn’t go back, but it was remarkable just the same.)

At the end of the year, Czechoslovakia ceased to exist as the Czech and Slovak sections of the country decided to go their own way.

Fun fact: Czechoslovakia was born in 1918 in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_Agreement