Six years ago, after a semi-restful night on oxygen and a nice rehydrating IV along with a diuretic to get rid of the fluid build up I potentially had in serious places like my lungs and heart and brain but which they didn't have the equipment to test for, I was totally ready to keep biking. They were happy to get rid of me but they weren't letting me out quite so easy as all that.

After lots more checking of vital signs and lots more phone calls to some other bigger hospital maybe in the county seat but more likely in the provincial capital, they decided to drive me downhill to Zhuanglang County. Zhuanglang is only 18 kilometers away from Handian but it's 200 meters lower. I was very determined to ride my bike but, eventually, I was given a choice that wasn't a choice of riding in the front of the ambulance as a passenger or riding in the back of the ambulance tied down to a stretcher. 

Seeing as, once we got to Zhuanglang, I ended up at a hotel and not another hospital, I suspect that whoever they had been reading my vital signs to and playing the game of "no, we don't have that in our pharmacy" with was not with the Zhuanglang County Hospital.

I spent the night in Zhuanglang and then, the day after, I biked all the way to Yebao another 400 meters lower and some 60 kilometers away. The moment when the air started having air in it again, that the low grade headache I wasn't noticing went away, that I stopped being grumpy, it was a sparkly magical moment and I remember it quite clearly.

What I don't remember clearly is the road before that.

I know this because there are many buildings alongside the road that have clearly been there for many years. Many many years. Not just one or two or three years but ten or twenty or thirty. And, in my memory, it was a sleepy rural road with hardly anything on it. My memory doesn't even have the two, fairly sizeable, towns that the road passes through.

In my trip journal at the time I recorded that a lack of oxygen is known to lead to poor decision making and that I knew I was making poor decisions. But that lack of oxygen also leads to not caring very much about the consequences of those poor decisions. It's really quite a lot like being drunk.

If it was a sleepy rural road at the time (which I doubt), it's not a sleepy rural road any more. Hopefully, the current state of traffic is just related to the current state of the apple harvest and the current state of the under construction expressway. Because I really hate to think that I might have been operating a vehicle—even just a bicycle—in that condition in traffic.

Despite the traffic I had to deal with after Zhuanglang, it wasn't an unpleasant ride. The road was doing a reasonably good job to standing up to the weight of the many construction vehicles, drivers mostly respected the laws of physics when it came to things like pulling completely out into the opposing lane to overtake slower vehicles, and underneath the dust and tang of coal smoke, everything smelled like apples. It was also almost entirely downhill the whole time.

The road before Zhuanglang was mostly notable in that it was very very cold. Even though the air outside had felt like I could get away with wearing shorts when I stuck my head out the window, and even though it seemed like I didn't need to layer up after I got dressed and went outside, I hadn't counted on the fact that I was going to be constantly going downhill! Although I kept my legs bare on the grounds that it was just too much hassle to cover them, I ended up pulling out my glove liners and my windbreaker.

About two thirds of the way to Zhuanglang, I stopped to check out a small temple and take a phone call from my parents. That hour was enough for the sun to warm the world up to reasonable temperatures.

At brunch in Zhuanglang, I was (again) mistaken for being Chinese when I ordered beef noodles at a non-Muslim restaurant that, judging by their menu, only served beef noodles.
"Are you Han or Hui?"
"Neither."
"Well, our food isn't halal just so you know."
"Yeah, that's fine."

My plan in 2012 had me going through Lianhua Town on the S304 to Qin'an County which led to my being very surprised when I followed the S304 and followed it and followed it and followed it and not only never got to Lianhua Town but somehow ended up in Yebao! The new S304 that went along the bottom of the cliffs without ever going up over the mountains had been built but none of the maps had been updated.

This time, my plan involved actually going to Lianhua Town. I wasn't entirely sure which route I was going to take after Lianhua but all of my routes had me passing through Lianhua. When a phone call from a client interrupted my quest to find the signposted but nonexistent tourist site in Lianhua, I ended up calling it quits for the day, pulling out my laptop and working.

Now that I was in Lianhua and could ask road information as well as spend some serious time looking over the topo maps and rereading my journals from 2012, I decided that going up over and across mountains is a highly overrated activity and that the 'new' S304 from 2011 would be a perfectly lovely road for me to take on purpose on the morrow.

The hotel I chose for the night was fine with having me fill in my details in the paper logbook of visitors and I never did find out whether they specifically told the police I was there or if someone else did. In any case, the officers who came by to double check my existence and to take notes were very friendly about it.