One of the best days out to be had in St Petersburg is a day trip to the former imperial palace and park at Peterhof.
Here you can visit the sumptuous palace of Peter the Great, tour the beautiful gardens and stop for lunch at a traditional Russian eatery.
Peterhof, once the former summer residence of the Tsars, has acres of beautifully laid-out parkland and is famous for its intricate French cascade fountains.
Our day started early at 9:30am when we set out for the Baltisky Station via the metro. The station is small and has only a few platforms, with most trains heading out towards Peterhof.
A ticket will cost you around 600 roubles for the electric train, which took around 40 minutes to reach our destination -- Novy Petergof, or New Peterhof Station.
A bus from the station takes you through the late 19th-century town with its fine, if not a bit run-down, mansions to the walls surrounding the former Imperial estate.
The palace is an impressive sight as one approaches it from the road and it easily ranks with Fontainbleau or Versailles in France.
At the entrance visitors are greeted with a brass band dressed up in traditional 18th -century court costume, complete with powdered wigs and feathered tricorn hats.
Here's your chance to be photographed with a Catherine the Great look-alike and her dandy consort. Judging this spectacle a bit tacky, we swept on past.
After a row with the ticket office -- foreign tourists get clobbered for 26,000 roubles while people living and working here pay around 3,000 roubles -- we began our tour.
Walking through endless rooms of opulence and luxury brought on quite an appetite so we headed for the a small restaurant located in the Upper Park.
Cafe Peterhof is no ordinary cafe but a restaurant which serves a very extensive menu consisting of cuisine from the various Russian republics, Eastern Europe and dishes from Germany.
By the time you leave you'll feel so full you'll hardly be able to stand.
We tried traditional Russian Solyanka at $3 for starters. This is a rich meat and vegetable broth, warm and filling, served in a clay pot.
For the main course we settled on a chicken theme, both having chicken dishes from different former Soviet republics. Chicken Tabak at $6 from the Georgian republic was spicy and well-garnished with heaps of fresh salad and fries.
I plumped for mouth-watering chicken Kiev with carrots, salad garnish and chipped potatoes, also at $6.
The waitress was unbelievably friendly and made our meal a real pleasure as she chatted about the restaurant, which opened four years ago.
We rounded off our meal with generous portions of flavored ice cream at $1.30 and coffee with thick, sweet condensed cream. In all, a filling three-course meal for two will set you back around $30. Well worth it.