I put a huge amount of planning into my bike trips in China. The full map, complete with a second potential route for 2018, all the interesting looking detours I could find via googlemaps, and bonus every place I've ever slept while biking is at https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NmPJO8WibmXR-CZfLq9XcfTMEmA&usp=sharing and will probably stay there for the foreseeable future.

In addition to weeks of tweaking things online to get the Perfect Route, I also go out and buy my favorite paper maps by 星球地图出版社. I've actually found it increasingly difficult to get the water resistant maps which I used in 2008, 2012, and 2014 and now buy atlases for the correct regions, chop them up into the relevant parts, and waterproof them with a truly prodigious amount of sellotape.

My route is further modified when transferring it from Google to paper as years of experience have told me "if it's not on the paper map, you really should not trust it" alongside "just because it's on the paper map, doesn't mean you should trust it".

The idea had been that I would send my passport in to the Public Security Bureau for a renewed residence permit extra super early, start off on my trip sometime around August 10th, and ride until I met one of the necessary preconditions of stopping such as: actually arriving in Haikou, being bored, hurting, or winter. 

Obviously, since I'm writing this on August 18th, that August 10th start date didn't materialize. And, as of yesterday, I've now got a concrete stop date that is none of the four aforementioned preconditions but is instead: Flight to Spain.

1. First, they wouldn't let me start the process on renewing my employment permit until 3 months before expiration or July 19th. 
2. Then, the Public Security Bureau said I couldn't get my passport back until August 21st (and I chose not to pull influence or use any connections to get it done faster). 
3. Finally, my sweetest best beloved got his vacation/work-from-home-with-home-defined-as-Europe approved and found that the best dates for his flight from Baltimore to Barcelona were early December to mid-January. 

C'est La'vie.