I unfortunately forgot to set my alarm to wake up and go to Tula, so I had to choose an alternate destination. Flipping through a guidebook, I decided that Gorki Leninskie would be a good choice: it wasn't far and the directions seemed simple enough.
Gorki Leninskie served as Lenin's dacha, and was where he died following a series of strokes. The estate has since been preserved, and around it added a Lenin museum, Lenin's quarters in the Kremlin, and, for some reason, something that appeared to be a billiards museum.
Getting to and from Gorki Leninskie turned out to be more difficult than I expected: while the guidebook indicated which bus went to the estate, this bus was not indicated on any signs in the metro station or above ground--this fortunately turned out to be only a minor problem, as I somehow found it anyway, despite the area being crowded with airport shuttles and other buses.
On the trip there I was surprised at how quickly the high rises of Moscow quickly dissolved into a fairly blank countryside: there weren't really any suburbs to be found. This coincided, unfortunately, with a lack of obvious indicators about where one was, and I missed my stop by a considerable amount. I instead got off in a cluster of dachas, but was fortunate enough to get some directions from the driver, which I essentially understood as "go through the school and across the bridge, and then a while longer." 'A while longer' turned out to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 minutes' walk, during which I really had no idea where I was going--but the weather and scenery were nice, so this was okay.
Shortly after crossing the aforementioned bridge, I encountered a Lenin statue, which was sadly only part of the aforementioned school, not the estate. Continuing on, I found several other things mentioning Lenin, so assumed I was on the right track. Luck was with me, and I did eventually reach the estate. There I went on a tour of the grounds, notably including a number of documents written by Lenin, the telephone connections to the Kremlin for which Lenin chose the estate, and the room in which he died.
The best attraction, however, was Lenin's custom Rolls-Royce, a sort of car-tank-sledge hybrid designed to get Lenin back and forth through the snowbound Moscow outskirts in the winter--and look extremely awesome while doing so.
Photo © Danner Glide http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannergyde/2740781491/
Getting back after the tour proved just as fun as getting to it--I had no idea where the actual bus stop was, so I just wandered along a highway with a sign reading 'Moscow' for an hour until I finally found my way onto some major road with more obvious bus stops. It was probably a rather stupid thing to do, but getting even mildly lost was a nice change from the certainty of the city, with its plainly laid out subway system and buses that always end up at some station or another.