Russians have a saying about carrying coals to Newcastle, and theirs is about taking your own samovar to Tula. The town has made samovars since the eighteenth century, and a museum of them stands in the center, with brass giants, tiny travelers' models and the elaborate urns used in merchant houses. Tula also made guns: Peter the Great founded an arms factory here in 1712, and the weapons works supplied the Russian army for centuries, so the old gunsmith's craft and the brass-tea tradition sit side by side. Add the gingerbread, spiced and printed with a pattern, and you have the three things Tula is known for.
The Kremlin is the visual center, a red-brick fortress finished in the early sixteenth century on the bank of the Upa River, with towers, thick walls and a cathedral inside. It is more compact and less ceremonial than Moscow's, and it served as a frontier stronghold against Crimean Tatar raids. Inside the walls, a pair of museums, one for weapons, the other for local history, are worth an hour. The city has a long, rather industrial skyline, but the old streets near the river retain a handsome, provincial charm.
Fourteen kilometers southwest lies Yasnaya Polyana, the estate where Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828, lived most of his life and wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The house is preserved with his study and library, the park has birch alleys and ponds, and his grave, a simple grassy mound in a patch of woods, is deliberately unmarked by a cross or inscription, as he wished. It is one of the most moving places in Russia, and well worth the ride.
Tula is a major city, so fuel, food and hotels are everywhere. The M2 highway links it to Moscow, about 180 kilometers north, and is fast but heavily used by trucks. The countryside to the south, near Kulikovo Field, where Dmitry Donskoy defeated the Mongol-Tatar forces in 1380, is open, rolling farmland with big skies. The best time is late spring or early autumn, when the light is soft and the roads are dry. Spring thaw and heavy winter snow make the side roads tricky, and summer heat can be intense on the open plain.