It's long since gotten to the point where I realized that there was no way I was making it to my Destination by the time it got too cold for tropical monkeys like myself. Therefore, a few days back, I had Tyra research the best sleeper train ticket combo that would get me back to Haikou. Those tickets have since been bought
For the wrong city.

It's all my fault too. While both 广安 and 广元 start with 广 (as do rather a lot of cities, including Guangzhou), they are most obviously not the same city to a person looking at the names in Chinese. To a person using pinyin when checking passenger rail availability via Trip.com's English app, however, they look a lot closer.

Guangyuan
Guang'an

I wanted to give up in Guangyuan.
However, I will be giving up in Guang'an.

Which not only isn't nearly as far away from me as Guangyuan currently is, it also involves me changing my route on the fly. Being as "changing my route on the fly" is a fairly common theme piggybacking atop of months of planning out a route that I'll only occasionally stick to, this isn't too much of a problem. The problem lies in that I picked a date that was reasonable for a leisurely ride to the farther of the two places.

So, I luxuriate in the warm bed until the morning sun finally turns the sky blue and I won't have to be departing while wearing any layers that need peeling off as the day grows warm.

It is while having lunch in Wanshan [万善] where I spent the night in 2012 that I pull out my laptop, pore over my pictures, and determine that I done fucked up and if I want to see if those cliff carvings are still there, I'd have to pull a u-turn, ride 20km south down the National Road and then turn around to go back to heading north. Not that this is such a terrible idea given the distance I have left between now and the train tickets but there's still the niggling problem of the Noise and I know that the bike shop in Nanchong [南充] is amazing amazing good.

Although I do make an effort to remember a few key items, I don't actually prep my phone with copies of photos from 2012 so as to intentionally go looking for the same thing 8 years apart. That being said, many of the things that were interesting and unique and worth photographing last time are still interesting and unique and worth photographing. There's even a few buildings where I'd just assumed "no way I'm going to find that" only to, of course, find it.

A combination of roadworks, photographs of things I find interesting, and a handful of TikTok videos burns through a lot of the day's hours but I still get into Ji'An quite early. Mentally marking the location of both the open looking guesthouse and the closed looking one, I continue up the street to the police station to try this whole advance "telling them I'm here" thing again and, although they'll end up coming by later in the evening when the Powers That Be decide that a more thorough registration of my details is necessary, the officer¹ who I talk to outside the gate is quite nice.

He recommends that I'd be more comfortable at Hotel #3 just up the street from the station and I see no reason not to check it out. As they subsequently agree to include use of their washing machine in the price of the room (100 yuan), I'm sold and that's where I stay.

In direct contrast to the last two front desks, the woman at this hotel also goes "Ahhhhhh! Foreigner!!!!" followed by asking if she can take a photo with me and have my WeChat. I then end up feeling bad about tonight being a night where I'm really planning on being anti-social and dining on oatmeal as she's very in need of friends. Particularly in need of friends who are also handicapped.

It took me something like 9 years and 6 doctors before my physical therapist's intern correctly diagnosed the increasing difficulty I had with walking as being related to my bad leg having healed short.

It's been 12 years since she lost her leg in the Great Sichuan Earthquake and, even if I had the relevant knowledge of her injury, I'd still be in no position to say whether it was an injury that normally would lead to amputation or if that was the best triage available at the time. Whether or not it was the best at the time, however, it's been 12 years, there's surely been follow-ups.

Her prosthetic is at least an inch too tall. And despite it being visible to the naked eye wrong, nobody, not one fucking medico, has thought to do anything about it. 

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¹ It probably means I'm getting old that I think he looks far too young to be a police officer. Mind you, in Zhongxin, while waiting for the truck that my bike would travel in to Wusheng, I was showing some of my favorite TikTok clips to the shift captain and discovered that he was born in 1996.