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The trip from Beijing back to Zuoquan was slightly less horrible than the trip from Zuoquan to Beijing. 
Slightly.

The day before yesterday, in the car on the way from south of Yanquan City to the North Yangquan Passenger Rail, I asked the driver about methods of getting back to Zuoquan from Yangquan once I arrived by train around 7pm. I'd deliberately asked Kaylee to buy me a ticket for late afternoon but not too late so that I'd get to spend a little more time in Beijing visiting friends who I'd missed on the two other visits but, at the same time, wouldn't get bogged down by rush hour traffic on my way to the train station.

Apparently, no one really wants to go to Zuoquan from Yangquan and, even if I arranged a ride outside of the Didi app (so no middleman to take a cut), it was still going to run me around CNY 400. Maybe more once expressway tolls were figured in. Coming on top of the train ticket, that's kind of a ridiculously much too large amount but I was willing to bite the bullet and accept it if I had to.

Then the driver asked me why I didn't consider taking a bus.

Why? Because it's nearly 500 kilometers as the unladen African swallow flies (700 for laden African swallows, as, like me, they aren't very good at straight lines) and even if I did once take an overnight bus from Bordeaux to Milan, 500 kilometers is really getting into distances I think of as "airplane" territory rather than "bus" territory. It never even occurred to me to check if there were any buses going between Zuoquan and Beijing.

There are.
Or is.
One.
A singular bus.

In the morning from Beijing to Zuoquan and in the afternoon from Zuoquan to Beijing.

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I had Kaylee cancel my train ticket and buy me a bus ticket. I understand that the internet didn't like her (well, didn't like me and my 20+ letter name) and she ended up having to call the bus station to make it work. But that's the great thing about having an assistant. I didn't have to fight with the Chinese internet or talk on the phone to 'service with a snarl' customer service people who didn't care whether a ticket got sold or not. I just had to send a WeChat message and wait twenty or thirty minutes.

Some people would say that a 9am departure on the morning bus from Beijing to Zuoquan isn't very early. Those people didn't have to get to the bus station in question from the far other side of Beijing while rush hour was happening.

I was up and out the door by a quarter past 6:00 and I got to the bus station by 6:45. If I'd left at 6:45, however, I might maybe have probably made it by 8:00. And I still had to navigate my way around the bus station finding things like where to pick up pre-bought tickets and stuff like that.

As I do more and more of my traveling in an unscheduled "wherever I end up" sort of way like bike touring or transit roulette, I have come to realize that I absolutely loathe being forced into a schedule.

It was a nice enough bus with seats that sort of reclined. No toilet on board though; also, an onboard GPS system that verbally warned the driver every time he was more than 1kph over the posted speed limit for buses, some other kind of proximity sensor that went dingdingdingding when he passed other large vehicles, and an 'entertainment' system that started off by playing a gruesome, graphic, and maudlin "Wear Seatbelts" Public Service Announcement four times in a row followed by excerpts from the 2014 Spring Festival Gala and—I think—seven episodes of a World War Two Anti-Japanese soap opera.

Also, about an hour and a half after we crossed the border into Shanxi and a mere hour after we were scheduled to have already arrived in Zuoquan, we got off the expressway. We then spent the next two hours driving on the same surface road that my bus from Zuoquan to Yangquan had taken. On the plus side, although we stopped many many times to let people off, we never stopped to let people on or to pick up packages.

I was ever so very glad to finally disembark in Zuoquan.