Yesterday the road tried to be the prettiest road I've ever ridden on. Today, I think it succeeded.

The past few days (and probably the next month) it's been too cold to really even consider biking prior to 9:30am. As a result, I've consistently been waking up around 7:00. Even by dawdling in the process of de-cocooning myself and repacking, it's still too damn early. I dawdle more over breakfast and coffee making but even though the sun is quite thoroughly up by this point and the sky thinking about being blue, it's cold. 

I start my day off disgusted at some random middle class people who seem to have no particular reason to be in this town other than it's on a National Road. I suppose they are probably trying to take a scenic route instead of the expressway and I ought to laud them for that but instead I want to go over and slap some sense into the woman who thinks it's so cool to see a peasant with a donkey cart that she puts her child in the back of the cart without asking so that she can take a nice picture of her child in a real donkey cart being used by an actual poor person. I'm not sure if the owner of the donkey cart actually made the donkey speed up or just deliberately didn't slow down but somehow they were surprised when the cart kept moving and the kid started howling in terror.

Fortunately, they were so self absorbed once they got the kid out of the donkey cart (apparently in posting the photo rather than in comforting the kid) that they didn't notice me or my dayglo green windbreaker. Cause you know they would be the kind of people who also had to have a photo with a foreigner.

I'm getting a lot of people this trip taking photos with me. It feels like at least one a day. Sometimes more. I can't decide if it's actually more people taking photos or if more people have gotten the message that you should ask first and I'm therefore noticing more of them. So far, I've only had one person specifically give me a gift (a teen on the back of an e-bike in Qingjian) but I've also only had one person who was sufficiently annoying about the photo taking that I made zero effort to look pleased. On the other hand, no one has gotten to the point (yet) where I've put my hand in front of my face.

By the time I get to my turnoff, the clouds have completely gone away and the sky is a brilliant blue. For some reason that I can't figure out, my shifting has suddenly gone all wonky and I can only use the lowest gears but I'm going to spend the whole day either going up steep hills or coasting and shifting is one of those magical mysteries I generally leave to bike shops as the few experiments I've done over the years have mostly served to make 'moderately not working' things become 'totally not working' things.

The road I'm on works going from south to north because, despite the many intersections and the few signs, I'm always able to pick the right road by virtue of going with the one in better condition. This would not be the case if I was heading the other direction as the road I'm on is so often so heavily coated in loess dust tracked by large trucks heading from the many little oil derricks scattered all over the place. Considering that this is apparently the main trunk road for servicing all kinds of side roads with even more wells, the paving (underneath the dirt) is quite good. It's just that there's a lot of dirt, and it's often the soft dusty kind that you sort of slide into rather than being able to bike through.

Eventually, however, it comes to pass that there are fewer and fewer patches of dirt covered pavement. I also start getting glimpses of striped danxia rock formations in some of the canyons. In terms of danxia, they aren't especially spectacular but it's the first time I've seen danxia outside of a photo and I'm suitably impressed. The yellow tint in my sunglasses seems to be enhancing the reds and oranges and yellows of the landscape without effecting the blue of the sky. From previous (yellower) pairs of sunglasses, I think this is my brain compensating for the knowledge that the sky simply cannot be green.

There's a long and steep and nasty climb when the stream the road has been following finally goes away. Considering the number of windmills on the ridge, I seem to have gotten lucky about not having a headwind to deal with as well. I figure from here that it's going to go down but I seem to have found myself on a plateau and while there is some down, it's nowhere near as much as the up. Thankfully, it's also not as steep. This road is still a service road for the oil fields, and I'm frankly astonished by the sheer size of some of the things I've let pass me. 

I wouldn't want to have to test my brakes if one of them were coming up when I was on the descent and I imagine that they must coordinate with each other about who can drive in what direction at what time of day since there are plenty of sections where it would be impossible for one of them to even scrape past a vehicle going the other way.

Gaojiagou, the town which the government people at the Zhongshan Grottoes told me absolutely would have a place to stay, doesn't even look like it has places to eat. Maybe there's some less abandoned parts further off the main road but it reminds me of the parts of rural Shanxi where transportation options came and the residents collectively discovered the benefits of living somewhere else. Unlike those parts of Shanxi, however, the very rural bits of countryside all seem to still have people.

After Gaojiaogou, I'm finally on something that's not a tiny farm road. In terms of road name and route number, it's the same road I've been on all day but it's also very much something else entirely. My hopes that the increase in stature of the road might eventually lead to someone having opened up a restaurant along the road aren't fulfilled, however. Perhaps, if they had and perhaps if I'd been less hungry and less trending towards cranky, I might have spent more time trying to find a way to the ruins of the Qingping Fort but I knew how much the clear dry air made far away things look closer and by that point all I really wanted was somewhere to sit down with food.

And I wouldn't get that until I'd been on the main S road for a good seven or eight kilometers.

My plate of noodles was at least the size of my head. It was an enormous quantity of fried noodles. A ridiculous amount to be giving to one person. I finished it.