CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. 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.
212 km from Kronstadt to Kronstadt, about 3 h 19 of riding. The stops in between: The Palace and Park Ensemble of the Villag, Krasnoe Selo, The Ensemble of the Zinoviev's Datcha and back through Krasnoe Selo. 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 34 km. The line follows the shore because there is nowhere else for it to go.
Sailors in the Gulf of Finland used to say that Kotlin Island was a long grey shape you saw only when you were already too close, and Southern Battery No. 3 is part of the reason the sailors came to respect it. It stands on the low, southern shore of the island, facing the channel that runs past Lomonosov on the mainland, one of a numbered line of coastal batteries that guarded the approach to Saint Petersburg from the sea. The batteries were built for guns and are now mostly quiet, grassy ruins of earth, brick and concrete.
Read the complete Southern battery No 3 write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Southern battery No 3 is where the day begins. Next is The Palace and Park Ensemble of the Villag.
Gostilitsy is a village on the Izhora Upland, west of Ropsha and south of Peterhof, and it is one of those places near St Petersburg where the imperial past hides behind fences and overgrown trees. The estate here is associated with Alexei Razumovsky, the Ukrainian Cossack singer who rose to become the favourite and, by many accounts, the secret husband of Empress Elizabeth in the eighteenth century. The palace and park ensemble that grew up around the manor included a house, a church, ponds and landscaped grounds fed by springs, and it is listed among the monuments of the historic centre of St Petersburg and related groups, a UNESCO site that includes many of the palaces and estates around the city.
Read the complete The Palace and Park Ensemble of the Villag write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The Palace and Park Ensemble of the Villag comes up about 38 km into the recorded legs. Next is Krasnoe Selo.
Readers of Anna Karenina will know Krasnoye Selo, even if they have never been within a thousand kilometres of it. It was here, at the summer camp of the imperial guards, that Tolstoy set the officers' steeplechase in which Vronsky rides his mare Frou-Frou to disaster in front of the court. For more than a century, from the early nineteenth century until the revolution, the guards regiments of the Russian army gathered each summer in this area south-west of Saint Petersburg for manoeuvres, parades and horse races, and the tsar and the court came to watch. It is listed as one of the monuments associated with the historic centre of Saint Petersburg.
Read the complete Krasnoe Selo write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 67 km into the recorded legs you reach Krasnoe Selo. Next is The Ensemble of the Zinoviev's Datcha.
Here the Neva is a working river, broad and fast, carrying barges and the outflow of Lake Ladoga past factories and housing blocks on its way to the city. Yet on the left bank near Ust-Izhora, among the industry, survive the traces of a much older riverside life: the country houses, datchas in the old aristocratic sense, that Saint Petersburg's wealthy families built along the Neva in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with parks running down to the water. The ensemble of the Zinoviev datcha is one of them, included in the long list of estates, parks and buildings that make up the World Heritage Site around the historic centre of Saint Petersburg.
Read the complete The Ensemble of the Zinoviev's Datcha write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The Ensemble of the Zinoviev's Datcha, about halfway. Next is back through Krasnoe Selo.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Krasnoe Selo write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Krasnoe Selo sits at 144 km, about halfway. Next is back through The Palace and Park Ensemble of the Villag.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete The Palace and Park Ensemble of the Villag write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through The Palace and Park Ensemble of the Villag comes up about 173 km into the recorded legs. Next is Southern battery No 3.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Southern battery No 3 write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Southern battery No 3 closes the day.
Southern battery No 3 → The Palace and Park Ensemble of the Villag is 38 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
The Palace and Park Ensemble of the Villag → Krasnoe Selo is 29 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Krasnoe Selo → The Ensemble of the Zinoviev's Datcha is 38 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
The Ensemble of the Zinoviev's Datcha → back through Krasnoe Selo is 39 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Krasnoe Selo → back through The Palace and Park Ensemble of the Villag is 29 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through The Palace and Park Ensemble of the Villag → Southern battery No 3 is 38 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.