Peterhof sits on the south shore of the Gulf of Finland, about half an hour's ride west of central Saint Petersburg when the traffic behaves, and the Colonists' Park is one of its quieter green corners. Most visitors come for the Grand Cascade and the gilded fountains of the Lower Park and never notice that the wider Peterhof estate is a patchwork of separate gardens laid out by different tsars over a couple of centuries. This one belongs to the later, more relaxed layer: lawns, big trees, ponds and paths meant for strolling rather than for impressing ambassadors.
The ride out is flat, and I mean properly flat. The land here is a low coastal plain, a terrace left behind by the retreating Baltic, so there are no corners worth the name, only long straight roads, tram-straight avenues and a lot of traffic lights. The Peterhof highway out of the city is busy at commuter hours and on summer weekends, when half the city heads for the fountains, so go early or accept a slow crawl. What you get in return is a very particular light: pale, low, silvery, and in June the white nights stretch the evening almost to the next morning.
Peterhof itself is a proper town of some seventy thousand people, so petrol, food and coffee are all easy within a kilometre or two, and there is no need to plan around it. Parking a bike near the park is simple compared with the palace crowds, and the paths under the trees are cool when the main avenues are baking. Mosquitoes in midsummer are real, so do not sit by the ponds at dusk in a T-shirt.
The history here is the history of Peter the Great's ambition to turn a swampy Baltic shoreline into a window on Europe. He founded the palace complex in the early eighteenth century as a seaside answer to Versailles, and the estate was nearly destroyed during the Second World War, when the occupation left the palaces gutted and the fountains' pipework wrecked. Restoration took decades and in some respects is still going on, which gives the whole place a slightly scrubbed, recently reborn look that is rather moving once you know the story.
If you have the choice, come on a weekday in May or September. The trees are doing something worth looking at, the fountain queues are shorter, and the park is the sort of place where you can park the bike, buy a coffee in town, and take a slow hour with the gulf only a few minutes away.