First order of business, obviously, is to pick up my bike from the bike shop and return the backpack they loaned me. I also get route advice in the form of an intermediate point I should set my GPS to in order to get the best riding experience.

While I do, in fact, have a pretty great riding day, none of what I come across even vaguely resembles any of what they told me I'd come across and I'm pretty sure that it's not the right road.

The important thing, however, is that even if it isn't the right road, it also isn't the wrong road. From last night's drive back to Xixia, I know that much of the truck route is in desperate need of resurfacing and that far too many of the non trucks using it drive like complete maniacs. 

On the farm roads, I regret not stopping for better photos or any video of tobacco being harvested and sorted as, at the time, I'd been sure I'd see more and not only did I never see more, I soon left the areas currently planting tobacco.

As I'm mostly on secondary roads rather than crossing through villages, I only get the slightest taste of how Covid is currently affecting things. EZ-up pavilions at the entrance roads either with bored looking younger people on their phones or large groups of socializing older people, occasionally a bullhorn with a recording on repeat, a spray bottle of hand sanitizer, a neighborhood sign-in sheet. 

No one particularly appears to be taking things seriously. In many cases, the desk under the EZ-up is completely abandoned as the red armbands that are theoretically minding it are off sitting a ways away somewhere a bit more comfortable but where they could presumably shout at someone if they needed to.

There's no sign of any roadblocks like the deliberately perpendicular to the road truck our cab had encountered on the failed visit to Luoyang's historic city walls and, although Maps is warning me that all of Neixiang's museums and sites of interest are closed, I assume that the falling numbers of new cases or the fact that almost everything that's showing up is showing up among already quarantined populations that the timing of my visit with Margaret was just right and things are mostly returning to normal after a brief but serious scare.

When my dinner of something local "I'll have what they're having" is eaten in a restaurant full of unmasked people (including staff) and my check-in actually goes smoothly, my confidence is further bolstered.

In fact, the only bad thing that happens today is the 3L bottle of kiwifruit wine which I bought to mail home to friends deciding that it didn't actually want to be tied to my rear rack and getting picked up by someone else in the minutes between it's falling off, my being told by a passing ebike, and my turning around to not find it.