Ride into Yegoryevsk from almost any direction and the first thing you see is the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, a huge, ornate church whose domes and towers dominate the low skyline like something dropped in from a much bigger city. It was built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with money from local textile merchants, and it is the kind of building that tells you exactly where the money in this town came from: cotton mills, weaving and trade, run by merchant dynasties who competed in piety as much as in business.
Yegoryevsk, named for Saint George, sits on the western edge of Meshchera in the southeast of Moscow Oblast. It has around eighty-five thousand people and still feels like a provincial industrial town, with old red brick factory buildings, wide streets and a mix of merchant houses and Soviet apartment blocks. There is a local history museum in a merchant's mansion, and the old trading rows near the centre are worth a slow look. Around the town the land is flat, with pine and birch forest, peat bogs and old phosphorite workings that left lakes and scarred ground.
The riding here is the gateway kind. From Yegoryevsk the roads head east into the forest country of Meshchera, long and mostly straight, with occasional bends around lakes or villages and a surface that varies from fresh asphalt to rippled, patched tarmac. Logging trucks and slow farm traffic are common. In summer the forest smells wonderful but the mosquitoes and horseflies near the bogs are fierce. In dry years the peat bogs have been known to smoulder, and the haze can drift across the roads.
As a stop, Yegoryevsk is straightforward and useful. Fuel stations, supermarkets, cafes and canteens are easy to find, and there are a few hotels. If you are heading deeper into Meshchera, this is a good place to fill up and buy water, because the villages ahead are small and the distances between services grow. Stand in front of the cathedral for a minute; it is one of the more surprising buildings in the region.