Wednesday Walk in the suburb of St. Petersburg Oranienbaum (Lomonosov) town

I told about a walk in a suburban park in Gatchina last week. My friends were very much inspired by my story about the beautiful autumn landscapes in Gatchina Park and we agreed to go for a weekend walk to one of the suburban parks. We chose Oranienbaum.

Here I should add a small foreword about suburban parks in St. Petersburg. To the south of St. Petersburg, there are former imperial residences with palaces and parks, as well as other palaces and manors. Some of them are located near the city, these are parks such as Peterhof (about which you probably read something, there are beautiful fountains in this park), Tsarskoe Selo, Pavlovsk. They are about half an hour away by suburban train. On weekends, these parks have a lot of visitors. So we decided to choose one of the remote parks for our walk. It takes an hour to get to Oranienbaum and we hoped that there would not be too many visitors.

When we came to the station, it became clear that many people decided to spend this warm sunny day off in nature. There were a lot of people in the train. In Oranienbaum, we were not able to go out immediately, we had to wait on the platform until the previous people passed the turnstiles.

We decided to go to one of the distant entrances to the park. On the way I took a picture of the park through the bars of the grid, it is a view of the Ruin Bridge from the cascade dam.

At the entrance, we found a queue again. The queue was moving very slowly, and according to the most optimistic calculations we would have to stand for at least an hour. It was amazing for me, I had never seen the queue to this park before.

But we were not upset. The weather was beautiful and we decided to take a walk along the streets of Oranienbaum and then walk along the shores of the Red Pond. The small town of Oranienbaum was founded in 1710, the historical buildings are partially preserved and a walk through the city turned out to be very pleasant.

Red Pond is located outside the city, but every year new houses come closer and closer to its shores. In some places, you can reach this pond by car, in others there are only hiking trails. The most unexpected find was graffiti:

Gradually we went further into the forest, from time to time we had to overcome water obstacles on wooden bridges.

We took a great walk and got tired enough, but decided to come again to the park entrance. There were no more than two hours left until the park was closed, the queue was reduced, but still stood.

On the way to the station, we continued to admire the autumn city landscapes.

On one of the streets, we saw a new monument. It was installed in 2015. It is a monument to the writer Nikolay Shadrunov, who lived in Oranienbaum and wrote stories, whose events are unfolding in this city. Next to the writer on the bench should be a figure of a crow, but it was stolen some time ago.

The sculptor chose the original way to leave his signature. The writer has a notebook on his lap where he writes something. If you look at what exactly - the name of the sculptor.

This is my entry for the #wednesdaywalk challenge by @tattoodjay.