A Walk in the Park

Today we drove a short ways to Monrepos park. The park reportedly started out as the estate of a tutor of a tsar; and was eventually inherited by his descendant who dedicated it to God. After he died and his mansion fell into disrepair it became a park. And I'm roughly paraphrasing when I quote this story.

The gate into the park.

It was another sunny day, but the temperature has dropped to about 36F during daylight hours. Since I left my boots and wool mittens in St.P, it's more noticeable than it should be.

The boarded-up mansion. Several years ago some of the church members asked if they could fix it up. The officials hemmed and hawed for no apparent reason and nothing came of it. As we are learning, don't ask why, because there is no reason.

 This little tower was perched on a small island where there's an old cemetery. You can get there by boat, or wait for the ice to come, so we couldn't get close. The man who built it meant for it to be a symbol of the house built upon the rock, right on the edge so people would remember that life can end quickly.

There were lots of grand trees and piles of moss.

Here's the gate at the water's edge leading up to the cemetery.

We had a good view out into another inlet or bay.

The fount of eternal youth, which is apparently broken since water hasn't come out of the lion's mouth for a while. This is the point where we turned back and walked toward hearth and home to warm our toes. So far I've stayed in CT ten days and been in Russia for just two weeks. Blog traffic peaked on Oct. 1st with 110 pageviews(I should have known- the cemetery post. Brings 'em every time) and had 1300 pageviews in the past month, which is about double the average during my normal costume posts. Either Mr. G is a very avid follower of my blog, or all those people who I told to read my blog, actually are!