We Made it to St. Petersburg!!

Today (Saturday), our last day of cycling L , was a short ride from Peterhof to St. Petersburg. The outskirts of the city are full of massive apartment blocks: ugly, dilapidated, Soviet-era ones, as well as fairly nice modern ones. The Russians are clearly into these enormous buildings. We peddled through the streets of St. P to our hotel, and shortly afterwards bade farewell to our excellent Estonian guide, Toomas Lelov, who rode with us for the past 5 days to help us make it through the Russian segment of our trip.

We spent most of the rest of the day trying to solve an important problem: how to package our bikes so that we can take them with us on our Monday morning flight to Boston. Despite Toomas' help, we were unable to locate a bicycle box at either a bike store or the airline we'll be flying on (Air France). So we took the subway to a large home improvement store (very much like Home Depot) and bought 10 fairly large cardboard boxes (but each considerably smaller than a bicycle) and a variety of supplies (tape, box cutter, string, etc). Tomorrow, we'll assemble these boxes into containers for two bikes, take apart our bikes, and package them for the return trip.

Once our "business" is done tomorrow, we'll spend some time sightseeing and getting together with a Doubilet relative (Michael Dubilet, whom we "met" via Facebook). Then, sadly, our adventure will be over.

Taking off on our final day with Toomas

A beautiful church on route

A massive, modern apartment block on the outskirts of St. Petersburg

In the home improvement store, using the phone app Google Translate to display "big cardboard box" in Russian. By showing this to the salesperson, he knew what we wanted and took us to the appropriate place in the store.

Our shopping cart with 10 boxes

Taking the subway back to our hotel, with our cardboard boxes