May 22, 2021
D37: 定边 → 红柳沟
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What with how late I was out last night, it's no surprise that I sleep late. I then start the morning off quite leisurely cause it's already late enough that my second potential stopping point is probably out of the question. Besides which, now that I've got a finger tip pulse oximeter, I can check what my oxygen saturation is at 1,350m before asthma medicine, after some medicine, and after coffee.
I've already been back over 1,100m every day for a week now so it's not as clean as the data I would have gotten if I could have measured myself that first day arriving back in Jingbian, but it's still data.
Without any medicine and having both missed last night's puffs and been in the presence of smokers, one minute's readings is between a low of 88 and a high of 96 with most readings being between 90 and 92.
By the time I've had two puffs of the tall blue inhaler, two puffs of the short orange inhaler, and made and consumed two shots of espresso I'm reading 88 to 97 with most readings hovering around 96 or 97.
Given that my chest CT does not show the scarring I thought it should (from an accident 21 years ago), this mostly confirms that "something is wrong" and that whatever it is responds to asthma medicine. Other than the lung function test at sea level indicating that I possibly also have asthma, it'll be a while yet before we can figure out what's wrong.
In a couple weeks, right before I hit the arbitrarily defined point where I start taking altitude medicine (1,500m), I will get another lung function test to see if anything different shows up than what was happening at sea level.
It's very very windy when I leave the hotel. And dusty. I wouldn't go quite so far as to call it a sandstorm but the sky is a rather bilious yellow gray and I decide that now is the perfect time to open and don the N95 mask the CDC gave me.
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Other than "minor" problems like it tangling with my helmet straps or making my sunglasses (which are self adjusting from nearly clear to super dark) fog up, I actually find it substantially more comfortable to wear than an ear loop mask and, when I eventually take it off, I make a point of tucking it back in the plastic wrap it came in to keep for the next time I want to mask¹.
On the way out of town there's a very unnoticeable bit of Great Wall that is only not mistaken for the berm where train tracks once ran because of a sign proclaiming it to be the Great Wall.
After that though, unless you consider tumbleweed interesting or Douyin nuking the comments section on my tumbleweed video (apparently because people were arguing over whether or not Russia is in Asia) and causing me to go from a few hundred views a minute to a few hundred views an hour, there was nothing interesting between Dingbian and Hongliugou.
I note that if I had continued yesterday, and if it hadn't gotten chilly, that there were plenty enough trees for hammocking and that the area looks plenty enough settled that the guy last night who told me I shouldn't camp because there might be wolves might be remembering stories his grandparents told him about being caught out at night.
Sky just starts spitting cold water that wants to be hail as I arrive in Hongliugou and turns into a proper rainstorm as I'm eating a late lunch so I check in at the nearer of the town's two hotels and take a three hour nap.
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¹ My "cold storage" stuff I don't regularly need pannier also has half a dozen masks in single-use packaging which were provided by my hotel for people attending the Expo
Today's ride: 33 km (20 miles)
Total: 1,283 km (797 miles)
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