On the northern shore of the Gulf of Finland, just beyond the city's edge, Olgino is a place of pines, sand and low wooden houses, a seaside suburb that grew up a century and more ago as a retreat for Saint Petersburg families who wanted fresh air and the beach without travelling far. It is part of the World Heritage Site that wraps the historic city and its surroundings, which includes not only palaces but villages, parks and landscapes like this one.
The skyline here has changed dramatically. A couple of kilometres east, the Lakhta Center, a tapering glass tower more than 460 metres high and the tallest building in Europe, rises out of the flat shore like a needle. From the beach at Olgino it dominates every view, a sharp modern contrast to the low wooden datchas behind the dunes.
Follow the coast road west and you enter what was, before 1940, Finland. The Karelian Isthmus coast is lined with old resort villages: Sestroretsk, Komarovo and Repino, where the painter Ilya Repin lived and worked at his estate, the Penates, now a museum. The road runs through pine woods with glimpses of the sea and the occasional lake, and in summer the beaches are full of families.
The Primorskoye highway is busy on summer weekends, with long jams heading out of the city on Friday evening and back on Sunday. Elsewhere the riding is easy and flat, with sandy verges, pedestrians crossing to the beach and the odd speed camera. Winter turns the gulf into a white plain where people fish through holes in the ice.
Practical matters start with the big one: Russia is currently very difficult for most Western travellers, with sanctions and visa, insurance and payment obstacles, and many governments advise against going. If you are here, Lakhtinskiy, two kilometres away, has fuel and shops. Smoked fish from the gulf, especially the small smelt-like koryushka that Saint Petersburg celebrates each spring, is the local treat.