For decades, I thought I was meant never to see Russia.

In 1980, I was to have been part of a three-man Gannett News Service team covering the Moscow Summer Games. But the Soviets went over the border into Afghanistan and President Jimmy Carter leaned on the U.S. Olympic Committee to boycott the Moscow Games, and the Yanks stayed home — and so did the the GNS reporting team.

Six years later, Ted Turner put together something called the Goodwill Games, in Moscow, and I would have gone to that as a reporter … except that one of my brothers was getting married, and I was not going to miss it. (A colleague went to Moscow, instead, and is still telling stories about his two-and-half weeks there. Yes, Lenin’s Tomb …)

And from 1986 forward, it just seemed unlikely. Whether it was the Soviet Union in the 1980s or when most of it became just plain Russia, in the 1990s. Far away. Hard to reach. A reputation as a difficult place for American tourists.

So, what was I thinking as I entered Russian territory this morning?

I was thinking how awfully cold it was.

Soon after, I was thinking what a fine and interesting city St. Petersburg appears to be.

It was barely above freezing when we ventured down to Deck 1 to go ashore. We were prepared for temperatures in the 50s, or even the 40s, but not in the 30s with a piercing wind.

In Estonia, the day before, wary of the weather as it leaked rain, I purchased a thoroughly ridiculous snowboarder-type knit cap, with “TALLINN” in tall letters on it and flaps to cover both ears. Which was crucial to the rest of the the day.

We needed a full hour to get off the boat (“Welcome to Russia,” said one of the ship’s security detail, sarcasm evident) and through passport control, where we were closely scrutinized by Russian agents. Never know what sort of international criminal will attempt to sneak into Russia via a cruise ship.

We were met on the other side of the wall by our tour guide, Sasha, a woman of about 30 with strong (but a bit peculiar) English. She led the group of 16, all from this boat, out to the Mercedes mini-bus (driven by Sergei) that is to be our ride for two days.

It was gray and windy, though not quite raining, when we reached a spot in the city where Sasha thought we should get out and look around. A place called the “arrow” on an island in the Neva River. Where we could see the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul to our left, and the long pastel-colored bulk of the Hermitage museum to our right.

We did some driving around town, several times passing the two-legged rearing horse under Peter the Great, as our guide pointed out various landmarks, trying to give us a sense of the city’s primary landmarks.

It soon became clear it is a handsome city of pastel-colored buildings (green, yellow, blue, even pink), few of them taller than four stories. The center of the city seems well kept up, and it is very European in the sense of no skyscrapers (soggy soil, and a sensible resistance to development), and even on a cold and gray day it seemed warm and welcoming.

Around noon, we went into the countryside, east of the city, and after an hour in the Mercedes bus (during which many of us slept, having been up since 6 a.m.), we reached the Peterhof, a palace and enormous formal garden along the banks of the Baltic.

We had not paid to go inside the palace, but it was too miserably cold to see the gardens (and its 150 fountains), and when many of the group nearly mutinied, because they were hungry, a sort of lunch was pursued in a cafeteria on the grounds. And then we went back to the bus.

The next stop was  the Catherine Palace, south of the city, and we discovered what must still be one of the great not-so-well-known tourist attractions.

The place is enormous, and lavishly, decadently decorated. It was built by Peter the Great for his wife, Catherine, but when their daughter, Elizabeth, took over as Czarina, she found it not quite impressive enough.

Elizabeth loved gilded everything, and what she expanded and improved upon led to big glittering place, inside, and a pastel blue on the outside. As we entered the grounds, Sasha said: “When we get here, people often say, ‘Now I know why you had a revolution.'”

She later said that Elizabeth’s spendthrift ways, which included never wearing the same dress twice, left the royal treasury empty when she died.

The most impressive of the many impressive bits is the “amber room” decorated entirely with pieces of amber, the brownish-orange, semi-precious resinous material that washes up on the shores of the Baltic. But the whole of it was mind-boggling.

In terms of a royal retreat, it seemed to leave Versailles in the shade. And someone else suggested it easily eclipsed Schonbrunn Palace in Austria, too.

A great story, of Catherine Palace, is that what we saw has been almost entirely rebuilt since World War II, when the building was largely destroyed. That would be as the Germans arrived, holding the place for three years while besieging what was then called Leningrad, and when the Germans left, perhaps after turning the palace into a fighting position.

(Sasha strongly suggested the Germans had torn up the place of their own accord; this, after noting that German officers had been based there. Certainly, some of the art would have migrated to Germany, but the invaders were not going to pull down the roof over their heads, just for fun, when such a fine dwelling presented itself during the long siege of the nearby city. I’m guessing some murderous back-and-forth there between armies was responsible for the place being a mess, by the end of the war.)

Driving back, we ran afoul of the Petersburg rush hour, exacerbated (for those of us attempting to reach the port) by only two bridges across the Neva River. We noted, during the long, long ride 1) the lack of domestic cars on the road, and the number of new and fairly upscale vehicles we saw and 2) the high degree of civility shows by Petersburg drivers, who signal to change lanes and almost never use a horn — a great departure from life in Abu Dhabi.

We arrived back at the docks nearly an hour late, at 6 p.m., having been working the tourism thing hard for nearly 12 hours.

It was worth it, however, just for the discovery — ours, anyway– of the Catherine Palace on our first day in Russia.