We went for a drive today.

The park with the archeological site for the walls of the Han and Wei Dynasty Palace and a reconstruction in rammed earth of said walls is quite a ways out of town in the middle of a bunch of corn fields and we figured something as completely outdoors as this and as lacking in general attractiveness to your average tourist had to be something that was open.

We figured wrong.

Fence is padlocked and there's a sign dated yesterday that it's closed until further notice.

Since the drive out was such a milquetoast bit of landscaped boredom perfect for training rides by the sort of people who also ride rollers in front of a TV set, we ask the driver (whose being paid a fixed rate to take us to sites, wait, and take us back) to continue north on the road we're currently on and meet up with the National Road in the hopes that we'll see anything from the car.

That first bit is alright. There's landscape that reminds Margaret of a childhood in Nebraska, a clearly closed temple with (rather inexplicably) a single windmill blade taking up the majority of the parking lot, a Covid related traffic control checkpoint where our driver has to sign in, and a truck parked across the road in lieu of a road block at one of the two exit points.

That's it.

That was the sum total of the interesting bits.

After that, it was mostly the kind of road that's almost but not quite an expressway and our highlights were as follows:

1. The off ramp for an as yet unconstructed rest area
2. A safe to stop bit of shoulder apparently favored by everyone who had missed the last public toilet
3. Our driver insisting that the GPS was wrong about telling him to turn right and his therefore adding another 50km of exurban manufacturing districts to our tour
4. A flyover with angles tight enough that you just had to believe that the road was in fact going to continue in front of us
5. Ummm...

This is the highlights mind you. The highlights!

Arriving back at the hotel, we decided instead of attempting to see if the Hot Springs we'd talked to on the phone the other day were open (and if they were open, trusting that they'd still be open when we got there), we chose instead to consume the entire bottle of Costco Margarita that had arrived by courier.

Today's charcuterie highlights were kalamata olives, dried strawberries and blue cheese. The biltong and the parmesan have been finished.