I could tell you all about the windy little roads I took in my quest to spend as much time as possible not on the main road. 

I could tell you about the kismet of the number of times where my randomly chosen point to have as a GPS destination that wouldn't insist on main road routing was something awesome like cliff graves or a bridge from the 1920s built with outrageously expensive imported concrete and looking much better preserved than the 80s bridge that replaced it long after this former main route wasn't even a tertiary concern.

I could tell you about lots of things: about vineyard tours that stopped five minutes before I finally arrived at the entrance; about the video of the presumably Russian eejits high off their tits on god knows what dancing in the middle of a Haikou street and threatening drivers with a machete¹; about a "historic town" that already had nothing of historical interest beyond Someone Important's Ancestral Home and an unhistorical town full of cool old things; about sitting outside a grocery store and rewriting articles on Hainanese cocoa for Large Media Client; about dinner in a night market.

It was a very full day.

With the exception of the part that involved the police, no part of the day was particularly exceptional in and of itself. And, to be completely fair, given how much experience I've got handling small town Chinese police, even that wasn't exceptional. It is, however, a good story.

After dinner, I looked at Maps and picked a place kind of at random. There was method to my madness but not a lot of method. Mostly, I thought (wrongly) that the Danfeng Grottoes with their 60y entry fee were going to be some Super Site so I didn't want too close to the road up, but also not too far either.

I paid. I dawdled and waited for my confirmation. I bought a 3kg watermelon and had it cut into pieces. I went to the hotel. As I struggled to get my bike on the sidewalk (the watermelon was in a bag hanging on my handlebars), someone came out and asked me if I was the Ms. Jin who'd just booked.

No, I'm the English name. Booked on CTrip. 
That would be this other booking then?
Yes?
Okay.

With my awkwardly large watermelon I needed some help actually getting into the lobby but this isn't actually unplanned on my part. It's actually a psychological trick. You see, if someone does something nice for someone else, even a really small thing like loaning them a pencil or carrying their watermelon, their brain seeks to justify this "being nice to them" by declaring that they already liked that person. End result is they are more inclined afterwards to continue doing positive things for that person.

Now, I'm in the lobby. I've paid for my hotel room in advance on a confirmed booking which was clearly made in my not Chinese name. Everything should be easy peasy. I give her my passport and the prefilled out Form and ..... cue freaking out about me being a foreigner.

I patiently explain that all she needs to do is add her hotel name and my room number to the part that says "hotel name" and "room number" and give it to the police. I let her know that other hotels have done this. I tell her that the police will probably come by the hotel anyways because "Covid makes everything a pain in the ass" (the mutual commiseration Jedi mind trick) but it's really nothing and I'm used to it by now.

I even show her the photo on my phone of the morning at the faux Sheraton where the officer was carefully copying the data on my Form onto his Form.

"This is too complicated! I need to call someone."

"Okay, but if you call the police, can I get my room key first? I want to take a shower."

She leaves the Front Desk presumably to make this call but all she does is get a mask. It's not just a case of there being no time for calls to actually get made, I watch her go, pick up a mask, and come back and then she tells me "sorry, no vacancies"

"Since you're lying while attempting to illegally cancel my booking, you'll have to pay me compensation."

"What? I'm not paying any compensation!"

"It's 5x the cost of the room²."

"No way. It's not my fault that the website sold you a room on a night when we have no vacancies. I'm not paying anything. You need to leave."

The first batch of room keys that I took off the Front Desk as I started the process of assigning myself a room (all while loudly and clearly announcing exactly what I planned to do) actually were rooms with guests who had given the key to the Front Desk so that their room could be cleaned. When I came back to the lobby, I threw those on the floor.

As she continues to sputter loudly that I can't be doing that, that I need to leave, and that there are NO VACANCIES, I went behind the front desk and took the second batch of identifiable keycards; went upstairs again, opened an empty room; came back downstairs; threw the rest of the keycards on the floor again; got my luggage, took it up to my newly assigned room; and, waited for the police to arrive.

I had time enough to take my shower and to determine that the bath towels this hotel had were quite large and covered as much or more (though perhaps less effectively) than a t-shirt and shorts.

It's not the first time I've started an interaction with the Chinese police clad in a towel. It probably won't be the last. Making them uncomfortable, making the men quickly and awkwardly step backwards, staring at the floor as they tell me to go back in the room and get dressed, it's a power play and a declaration to them of what I think our relative social statuses are. It also means that once I've opened the door again after getting dressed that I'm starting our chat as an apparently cooperative asshole and not a complete jerk.

The news about community spread in Xi'an isn't making the public rounds yet but they're very very concerned that Xi'an was my starting point, so concerned in fact that the confusion over how it's taken me 100 days to go 155km as the bird flies completely overwhelms anything else like maybe telling me I ought to be nicer to Front Desk ladies.

I do get asked, shortly before they leave, about the "disturbance" that happened before their arrival and I trim it down to the bare essentials: abooked and paid for room, a refusal to compensate me for an attempt to illegally cancel, and my taking a key and giving myself a room.

I can't be certain. I wasn't in the lobby. I couldn't hear what they said on their way back out. However, after as many years in this country as I've had as well as how checkout went in the morning, I know there's a decent chance that the Front Desk got chastised for what could have should have been just a routine request for one officer to come do a paperwork related aspect of their job but which instead had to be five after she provoked it into becoming a disturbance.

¹ Because I am the admin of the largest foreigners group in the province, I had a number of Official people contacting me to ask if I knew the offenders or anyone who might know them

² This is just as true and legal as "we don't have a license to take foreigners".