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.
A 179 km round trip from Russko-Vysotskoye - roughly 2 h 52 in the saddle. The stops in between: The Monastery Troitse-Sergieva Pustin, Kievskoe Highway, The Ensemble of the Zinoviev's Datcha and back through Kievskoe Highway. 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 25 km. The line follows the shore because there is nowhere else for it to go.
Ropsha is one of those places where the scenery is gentle and the history is anything but. The village sits on the low Izhora Upland southwest of St Petersburg, between Krasnoe Selo and the coast road at Lomonosov, and the palace that gives the estate its name looks down over a chain of spring-fed ponds and a slow, wooded park. It was here, in July 1762, that the freshly deposed Emperor Peter III was held after his wife Catherine seized the throne, and here that he died a few days later under circumstances nobody at court cared to explain. Catherine became "the Great"; Ropsha became a footnote with a chill on it.
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 is where the day begins. Next is The Monastery Troitse-Sergieva Pustin.
On the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland, between St Petersburg and Peterhof, the old road runs past a string of palaces and estates that the Russian elite built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to be near the sea and the court. Among them, near Strelna, stands the Trinity-Sergius Hermitage, a monastery founded in the eighteenth century as a dependency of the great Trinity Lavra of St Sergius near Moscow. It is part of the wide UNESCO listing of St Petersburg's historic centre and the monuments around it.
Read the complete The Monastery Troitse-Sergieva Pustin write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The Monastery Troitse-Sergieva Pustin comes up about 24 km into the recorded legs. Next is Kievskoe Highway.
South of Saint Petersburg, the flat, damp plain of Ingria runs off towards Pskov and the old western frontier, and the Kievskoe Highway is the road that heads that way, the route to Kyiv that gave it its name.
Read the complete Kievskoe Highway write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 59 km into the recorded legs you reach Kievskoe Highway. 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 Kievskoe Highway.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Kievskoe Highway write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Kievskoe Highway sits at 103 km, about halfway. Next is back through The Monastery Troitse-Sergieva Pustin.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete The Monastery Troitse-Sergieva Pustin write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through The Monastery Troitse-Sergieva Pustin comes up about 154 km into the recorded legs. Next is 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.
The Palace and Park Ensemble of the Villag closes the day.
The Palace and Park Ensemble of the Villag → The Monastery Troitse-Sergieva Pustin is 24 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
The Monastery Troitse-Sergieva Pustin → Kievskoe Highway is 35 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Kievskoe Highway → The Ensemble of the Zinoviev's Datcha is 30 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
The Ensemble of the Zinoviev's Datcha → back through Kievskoe Highway is 39 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Kievskoe Highway → back through The Monastery Troitse-Sergieva Pustin is 26 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through The Monastery Troitse-Sergieva Pustin → The Palace and Park Ensemble of the Villag is 24 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.