Pavlovsk and Pushkin sit side by side on the plain south of Saint Petersburg, and both grew from the imperial taste for country palaces. Pushkin was once Tsarskoye Selo, the Tsar's Village, where Catherine the Great had a palace of blue and white with a facade that stretches for hundreds of metres, and where the Amber Room once stood. Pavlovsk was a smaller palace for her son Paul, set in one of the largest landscape parks in Europe. The name means separate or detached, and it points to a part of the landscape set apart from the main royal grounds.
Tsarskoye Selo is where Russia's first railway opened in 1837, connecting it with Saint Petersburg, and it is where the poet Alexander Pushkin studied at the Lyceum as a boy, which is why the town now bears his name. The park around the Catherine Palace is full of ponds, pavilions and artificial ruins, built to look like ancient monuments in a painter's view. The estates nearby, including the one in the ride titles, belonged to noble families and officers who built villas around the court.
The riding is flat and slow. Roads around Pushkin and Pavlovsk are busy, with commuter traffic, bus lanes and city potholes, and the best time to go is a summer morning before the tour groups arrive. The parks are beautiful in September, when the birches turn yellow. Pushkin has almost ninety thousand people, so fuel and food are easy, and Pavlovsk has its own cafes near the park gate.
If the trip is possible, walk in the park and notice how much effort went into making an artificial landscape look natural. The sound of rooks, the smell of leaf mould, and the long straight avenues of lime trees give a particular atmosphere, calm and a little melancholy.