Nekrasovskoye sits on the left bank of the Volga roughly halfway between Yaroslavl and Kostroma, a settlement of a few thousand people that for most of its history went by a much plainer name: Bolshiye Soli, Big Salt. Brine springs rise here, and for centuries the town boiled salt for the Volga trade, which in old Russia was money as solid as grain. In the Soviet period it was renamed for the poet Nikolai Nekrasov, who grew up on the Yaroslavl side of the river and wrote some of the most quoted lines in Russian about Volga barge haulers and peasant life.
The ride here from Yaroslavl follows the river through flat to gently rolling country, birch and pine broken by fields, with the road surface ranging from fresh asphalt near the regional centre to patched, wavy tarmac once you leave the main roads. It is not technical riding. The pleasure is in the scale of the water, which at this point is wide and slow, and in the villages with their carved window frames painted blue and green. Watch for potholes after winter and for tractors pulling out of farm tracks without much ceremony.
A short way from Nekrasovskoye lies Vyatskoye, a former trading village that has been restored into a kind of open museum of merchant life, with brick houses, a church and several small museums. If the ride title brought you this way, that is the reason to linger. The salt springs themselves are tied to an old spa tradition, and the mineral water still has a reputation locally for being good for the stomach, though tasting it straight from the source is an acquired pleasure.
In practice Nekrasovskoye is a working town with what a rider needs: fuel on the way in, a few shops, cafes of the canteen kind and a bench by the river. Yaroslavl, about forty minutes away, is where you go for a proper meal and a hotel. Early summer is lovely here, with long evenings that stretch past ten o'clock and the river glowing pale until late; in autumn the birches turn yellow and the light goes amber. Mosquitoes along the water in June are relentless, so bring repellent and keep the visor down when you stop near the bank.