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Who: Hi, my name is Marian. I'm a 43-year-old American. I work as a translator from Chinese to English, sometimes for large companies but mostly for publishers and government departments.

Of course, if you are here instead of my other media and social media type locations you may have been following me since the days of that Other Website and you probably already know all this. However, assuming you are new to long-form tour journals and you haven't come across me in the past, I'm fathletic with an injured leg that requires a mobility aid, I went on my first overnight tour in 2005 and my first cross-continental tour in 2008, I have a job that allows me to work remotely, and I'm sort of a D-list celebrity in China.

What: My 2024 Big Ride or "大骑". 

Where: Starting from Beijing, heading west to Ningxia, and then south until the weather gets too cold for me to tolerate. I think I'll make it as far as Chengdu.

Why: Why not? Even though I'm pretty slow (see: injured leg mentioned above), super long distance bike rides have been my preferred travel method for over a decade. Note: I'm only listing the ones that were longer than 7 days.

1. 2005 - Beihai to Hanoi
2. 2006 - Haikou to Haikou via Sanya
3. 2008 - Haikou to Beijing
4. 2012 - Beijing to Haikou
5. 2014 - Haikou to Kunming
6. 2015 - Singapore to Kuala Lumpur to Singapore
7. 2015 - Shanghai to Changsha to Shenzhen
8. 2016 - Suburban and Rural Beijing
9. 2017 - Shanghai to Chongqing
10. 2018 - Beihai to Hanoi to Haikou
11. 2018 - Beijing to Inner Mongolia to Chengdu
12. 2019 - Shanghai to Hong Kong to Haikou
13. 2020 - Haikou to Sichuan
14. 2021 - Xi'an to Henan by way of Gansu
15. 2022 - Tangshan to Haikou
16. 2022 - Haikou to Haikou via Sanya
17. 2023 - Haikou to Tianjin
18. 2024 - Haikou to Haikou via Sanya

When: Well, I usually try to start my Tour in the spring but there were various reasons that I couldn't and then I was going to spend 3 weeks in Ireland in July and, as I've previously done both leaving a trip for a week plus and coming back and done going directly from biking to another country, I knew I didn't want to do that, so I moved it to a mid-August start date which got pushed to September 1 so that I could finish work, and then got pushed again to mid-Autumn festival because of some event I was supposed to be at that I'm not going to be at (in favor of a substantially better event) and now I'm seriously worried that winter is going to creep up on me before I'm far enough south to ignore it.

However, it is what it is.