North of Saint Petersburg's centre, the city thins out into a mix of suburbs, dachas, pine woods and the long marshy shores of the Karelian Isthmus.
This was dacha country from the nineteenth century, when wealthy Petersburgers built summer houses among the pines and the lakes, many in carved timber with verandas and little towers. Pargolovo kept some of these, with its old parks and ponds, though many have been replaced by newer homes. At Levashovo, a wooded area to the south, a memorial cemetery marks the Levashovo Wasteland, where thousands of people executed in the Stalin purges of the 1930s were buried in secret. It is a quiet, solemn place with rows of graves, and it is worth stopping if you are in the area.
In the autumn of 1941 the city was surrounded and the front line ran along this part of the isthmus. The Finnish army stood to the north, the Red Army dug in around the city, and a ring of defensive works, trenches, batteries and forts, was built in the woods, a part of what the Russians call the Blockade Ring. Some remains survive, mostly as earthworks and concrete shelters overgrown with moss, and a few have been made into memorials. The southern batteries listed on your ride belong to that same story.
As for riding, the roads are straight and fairly busy with city traffic, and surfaces vary from smooth new asphalt to patched older sections. The Priozerskoe and Vyborg highways, the main routes north, are heavy with trucks and commuters, and the pleasant riding is on the smaller roads through the pine woods, where birch leaves turn yellow in September and the air smells of resin and wet moss. Winter is long and dark, and snow lies from November until April.
Pargolovo, with twelve thousand people, and Sertolovo, with forty-three thousand, have petrol stations, shops and cafes, and the whole area is part of the metropolitan region, so nothing is far away. Check current travel rules for foreign visitors before you plan anything here.