With my destination set as a Catholic church I'd seen from the train, I somehow managed to spend the whole of today on back roads.

There were parts of the day that were lovely or any other positive adjective you'd like to be using. I was especially fond of the bald mountain that looked like I'd somehow managed to transport myself to the Scottish Highlands and of the Covid contact tracing checkpoint I passed through on my way there.

I don't know if the guy who not only had to record the whole process of his recording my data but who also wanted his photo taken with me was a fan or just someone who thought "hey, the cyclist in the Hat is cool" but I got my own selfie with him as well as the photos he took with me.

Not counting the night's hotel adventure, which was another one of those ones, the biggest issue I had with today was neither the abominable pavement coming the last 10km into town, nor was it the checkpoints and roadblocks.

Truth be told, although it kind of makes my shoulderblades itch, I find the idea of a manned checkpoint recording who was here in the event of needing to do contact tracing to be not entirely a bad idea. At least that's the feeling I have when, so far, not a single checkpoint has actually stopped me from proceeding. I imagine I might feel a little different if I were being prevented from going out or coming in.

The problem I had was with the closed stuff.

When they closed the Longmen Grottoes, it made sense. The two superspreader events that were the proximate cause of the recent outbreak were both at major tourist sites, and the spread came from people who were going from Major Site to Major Site.

I even have to say, after the Education Bureaus all issued Notices that students and teachers alike had to be back home no less than two weeks before the start of the next semester and everyone rushed home in one great big opportunity for cross contamination that there was a logical reason for what had happened. It was a logical reason that failed during the implementation stage but it made sense.

Closing second and third tier sites that bored students and teachers and family members who'd all cut short their holidays might want to go to was really annoying but it beat locking all those families up in centralized quarantine or forcing them to isolate.

However, there's a point where you have to say "Really? Why is this closed?" and that point has long since been reached when, having already gone back to masks and scan-in and hand sanitizer everywhere, you still decide on the basis of no reported cases in your county and all the second level close contacts of confirmed cases being under medical observation to close the fully outdoors sites like pagodas or shrines.

That's when it's not so much "reaching the point" for epidemic control as it is "jumping the shark".

Over dinner, I'm looking at my potential route north and the way I'm going to have to pass through one of those cities that puts a * on my track code and I'm thinking that getting into Beijing with one of those will be so hard that I might want to start thinking about quitting this year's Tour and going home.

Dinner eaten, I go to find lodging and well.... you know...