The highlight of the day was probably lunch in Qin'an with a TikTok fan who didn't quite grasp the concept of my having to carry everything I was given. I managed to refuse about half of the small green melons that weren't quite honeydew, and to give away three more of them to a rather surprised person that stopped me perhaps twenty minutes post lunch to take a photo with me, but I had to throw out the local cooked barley dish at the same time I decided to get rid of the rest of yesterday's watermelon, and I only ate the bits of the dragonboat rice cakes that had filling.

The nectarines, however, would last me another week of snacking.

I spend the whole day on what was once the main road between Tianshui and points north. Although there are large stretches within the bit that's hemmed in by car unsafe bridges where the road is completely unpaved, I can't make up my mind as to whether it was never paved or if the heavy vehicles used in construction of the Tianyi Fast Road (which I think opened around 2007) fucked the paving and then no one bothered to repave.

I took the Tianyi Road in 2012 and didn't like it one bit. Even now, in the parts where I'm closely paralleling it, the sound of fast approaching trucks makes me nervous.

I'd thought I might make Tianshui by tonight but the morning's dawdle and then my big lunch with a fan ate up enough time that the only possible way of hitting anything cityish is if I—as in 2018—go the long long way around on the flat river valley bottom to the new city. I rather want to take the original road over the mountain though so I end up stopping for the night in Zhongtan where my first order of business is to find a print shop and make a nicely pre-filled out Temporary Residence Registration Form for Foreigners.

It's not as pretty as the two sided version with vaccination data that I make and share with the foreigner community a few days later but it definitely ends up working the next time I encounter unwilling police.

I don't actually encounter unwilling police though in Zhongtan. This is because I do not encounter the police.

On a later date in a similar circumstance a call to the 110 Emergency Hotline will inform me that the locked up police station is not closed, just closed for daytime business, and that I could have eventually gotten them to show up if I'd just thought how. However, I didn't think how, and the hotel I picked was so certain the police would say "no" (on the basis of having had this happen to them before) that they decided not to register me at all.