CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
The recorded total and the leg detail need reconciliation. Inspect the leg notes before using this record for timing or navigation. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
224 km from Gatchina to Gatchina, about 3 h 49 of riding. The stops in between: The Palace and Park of the Mikhailovskaya, Primorskoe Highway and back through The Palace and Park of the Mikhailovskaya. The line favours views over speed.
Slow enough to look. The surface follows the shoreline, so the corners arrive where the water decided, not where an engineer did. Water arrives beside the road and stays for 66 km. The line follows the shore because there is nowhere else for it to go.
Gatchina has a palace that most visitors head for first, but the building that makes riders and architects alike stop and stare is the little Priory Palace standing on the shore of Black Lake in Prioratsky Park. It looks like a small Gothic castle with a tower and a chapel, pale and slightly unreal against the water, and it is built of rammed earth. Nikolai Lvov, the architect and polymath, put it up around 1799 for Emperor Paul I, who had made himself Grand Master of the Knights of Malta and wanted a residence to offer the Order. The earth walls, compacted in layers and then plastered, have now survived more than two centuries of Russian winters, which is a better record than plenty of brick.
Read the complete Prioratsky Park write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Prioratsky Park is where the day begins. Next is The Palace and Park of the Mikhailovskaya.
Carlo Rossi did not design a palace so much as a piece of a city. Between 1819 and 1825 he built the Mikhailovsky Palace for Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, younger brother of Alexander I, and at the same time laid out the square in front of it and the streets leading to it, so that the façades all answer one another. Today the palace houses the Russian Museum, which holds one of the greatest collections of Russian art anywhere, from medieval icons through Repin's huge canvases to Malevich and the avant-garde. Behind it the Mikhailovsky Garden runs down to the Moika, shaded and calm in the middle of the city.
Read the complete The Palace and Park of the Mikhailovskaya write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The Palace and Park of the Mikhailovskaya comes up 63 km in. Next is Primorskoe Highway.
Zelenogorsk used to be Terijoki, a Finnish resort town on the Gulf of Finland, and it belonged to Finland until the Winter War of 1939 to 1940, when this stretch of the Karelian Isthmus passed to the Soviet Union. Before that, Terijoki was a place where Russian aristocrats and artists kept summer houses, and the wooden villas that survive among the pines still have some of that air. The Primorskoe highway runs north-west from Saint Petersburg along the shore to Vyborg, and this is the part of it where the road threads a sandy, forested coastal strip with dunes on one side and wet pinewoods on the other.
Read the complete Primorskoe Highway write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
127 km in you reach Primorskoe Highway. Next is back through The Palace and Park of the Mikhailovskaya.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete The Palace and Park of the Mikhailovskaya write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through The Palace and Park of the Mikhailovskaya, late in the day. Next is Prioratsky Park.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Prioratsky Park write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Prioratsky Park. That is the ride.
Prioratsky Park → The Palace and Park of the Mikhailovskaya is 61 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
The Palace and Park of the Mikhailovskaya → Primorskoe Highway is 66 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Primorskoe Highway → back through The Palace and Park of the Mikhailovskaya is 66 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through The Palace and Park of the Mikhailovskaya → Prioratsky Park is 61 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.