May 20, 2021
D35: 城川 → 白泥井
Today was short again. This time because I had work. I also had laundry. And while I wasn't adverse to doing the full distance to Dingbian, I'm in the early stages of reacclimitizing my body to this daily madness while also starting at 1,300m¹.
Unlike yesterday the weather is stunningly gorgeous. Blue skies dotted by fluffy white clouds and everywhere I look I see flowers. It's also cool enough that I can cover up in tights and sleeves to protect myself from sunburn until the base tan is more established but not overheat.
To make the day even more nicer, it seems that word has gone round among the truck drivers to honk and wave. They aren't all doing it. In fact, most of them aren't. But compared to yesterday when it was none of them, it's still lots.
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I make room oatmeal, coffee, and check out by leaving my door wide open and my keycard in the more disorderly of the two piles.
I'm actually a bit miffed that no one ever came by the room to get me properly registered as I'd stayed dressed in anticipation of their impending arrival but, altogether, this had to be one of the most stress free hotel experiences I've ever had.
The lack of stress carries over into my day's riding where, other than my not bringing any ready to eat food, and my neither finding a place to eat or a place where I wanted to stop and sit and make oatmeal, it's a glorious glorious day.
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I never noticed the uphill that the GPS shows me as gradually having but I did notice the downhill. I also may have had some tightness in my chest that coincided with my being up in the low 14s. Certainly I did have a few coughing spells over the course of the day, I'm just not sure if they actually coincided to my slight rise in altitude.
I'm not entirely sure where or how (and I'm not willing to load the GPS track from 2018 to find out) but I ended up on a slightly different road where the Tourist Site that I kept telling myself was where I was going to stop and sit and make lunch never actually appeared.
I'm saddened to say that even though I was rural enough that a "Leaving Inner Mongolia" sign never happened, I knew even before I was sure that I'd completely stopped seeing random things captioned in Mongolian that I'd returned to Shaanxi as the litter reappeared not just by the sides of the road but wind scattered across the land as well.
It's funny, especially when it's all within the borders of the same country, how much of a cultural difference the invisible lines on a map make to an area.
If the 2pm brunch of hard boiled eggs, jarred fruit, and an ice cream outside a village store just before I left Inner Mongolia doesn't count as a real meal then my first real meal of the day happened on the outskirts of Bainijing. Two large overpriced roujiamo that were just the perfect combination of protein and fat to make me feel happy and sated and uninclined to go back outside when I knew I had, at most, only two kilometers left to me.
Circled the town before settling on a hotel that had an obvious laundry balcony visible from the street. Boss lady didn't have a problem with me staying but she also didn't want me registered and she also didn't want me to go out again after I was checked in for fear that someone might snitch about her having an unregistered guest.
This was sufficiently stupid that I made a half hearted effort to convince her otherwise but she switched tactics to it being my foreigness and, as I had work to keep me occupied and oatmeal to take care of any evening hunger pangs, I let it slide.
¹The arrival of my pulse oximeter, which won't happen for two more days, will empirically confirm that my symptoms are substantially worse up here than they were at sea level (i.e. they exist) and that asthma medicine is having a major positive effect on my ability to breathe.
Today's ride: 45 km (28 miles)
Total: 1,205 km (748 miles)
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