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It started with a plan to take a month holiday the Summer of 2011, once registration was finished, and go biking in Yunnan. Of course, that would have required that registration be finished by the end of Spring 2011. Which, of course, it wasn't.

There were many twists and turns and troubles, not the least of which was my bank incompetently messing up the paperwork on transferring in my Registered Capital, and freezing it for two months while they sorted it out. By the end of Summer 2011, I was borrowing money to eat. I gave my accountant my camera and college diploma as surety in order to get my Capital Funds Report so that I could perform the very last step which would let me access my money.

All in all, it was a clusterfuck of horrible.

And, as things progressed, my pie-in-the-sky vacation dream for the "Vacation to End All Vacations" got ever more grandiose, before eventually settling on riding from Beijing to Haikou after I dropped my visiting parents off at the airport in March 2012.

Once you've chosen a bank for your corporate bank account, it's no easy matter to move to another one. Once I'd confirmed that my specific bank was just unusually extra special incompetent (rather than it being a case of "China"), I would eventually change; but, it would take something like two years before I met all the necessary preconditions; and, when I did change, almost two months to finish. 

My laptop's operating system was in English so my bank's website didn't work at all and I had no online banking.

The corporate account holder options on the ATM weren't very well programmed and it would be over a year after I got an ATM card that I learned how to check my account balance via the ATM.

This meant, for the 96 days of biking that I did, I had no idea if any of my clients had paid me or even how much money I had.

As a result, I was very very frugal with my expenditures. I mean, I was biking across rural China so it's hard to spend a whole huge amount of money anyways, but I was still frugal. If something had an entry fee, I just didn't go in. If there was an option to stay in a truck stop motel for 25y instead of someplace nicer for 100y, I took the truck stop. I skipped bottled drinks in lieu of filling up my water at restaurants. I ate noodles more often than not. I accepted offers from strangers to buy me lunch.

Even so, I was totally gobsmacked when I got back to Haikou, got to my bank, got my bank statement and discovered that somehow I had spent over 3 months traveling and come back to find that my balance had grown by nearly $3000.

If this was going to be the end result of going on vacation, I suppose, I'll just have to go on vacation more often.