South-west of Saint Petersburg, along the shore of the Gulf of Finland, the land is a continuous belt of imperial estates. Peterhof is the best known, with its gilded fountains and long terraces, but behind it and around it is a countryside of parks, dachas and country palaces built by the imperial family and the aristocracy from the eighteenth century onward. Znamenka was one of these. The name comes from the Znamenie, the Sign, and the estate had a palace and a park that served as a summer residence, laid out in the landscape style that was fashionable in the nineteenth century.
The country around is flat, wooded and damp, with birch, alder, ponds and the occasional long avenue of old lime trees. The land is only a few metres above sea level, and the Baltic light is soft and silvery, with long dusk in summer and the famous white nights in June, when it never gets fully dark. In winter, the snow lies deep, and the gulf freezes at the edges.
Riding here is a matter of surfaces and traffic. The highways around Peterhof and Strelna are busy with lorries and commuter cars, and the old roads between the estates are patched and rutted, with frost heave in spring. The best time of day is early morning in summer, when the roads are empty and the parks are cool. The Kievskoe highway named in the ride titles is a main road, so expect trucks. Peterhof is a town of over seventy thousand, so fuel and food are easy there, and Strelna and Ol'gino are smaller.
For anyone planning a trip, the practical side of travel in this region has changed a great deal in recent years, and the rules on entry and on bringing a motorcycle are the first things to check. If you can go, the combination of landscape parks, fountains and the gulf makes a day worth having. A walk in the park, with the smell of damp leaves and the sound of rooks in the tall trees, is the best thing here.