Peterhof was a mess of people when we got there this afternoon. Prior to going, my friend Anthony was so inspired to see it that he hired us another hotel car to drive the hour-long distance there and back, in sheer BMW luxury that I’m unwisely and quickly getting accustomed to. After arriving and grabbing our tickets then getting through the turnstiles, we couldn’t exactly figure out the way to get through to the Grand Palace’s park, which turned out to be free. We had tickets to the garden at the back but in order to pass through the palace to get to the park we had to buy tickets to the palace. Our first encounter with non-English speaking locals that caused one miscommunication after another. Eventually we figured out that we just needed to exit the gardens and make a u-turn pass on either end of the palace, but not before making sure we milked the royal gardens of as many sun-filled, postcard worthy photos. Exiting the gardens solved our royal park access problem – I was satisfyingly able to snap to my heart’s delight and call our trip to Peterhof a wild success — hawking Chinese tourists and oddly-posing Eastern Europeans notwithstanding.