D24: 南乐 → 庆祝

June 27, 2022

The wobble has progressed from "I'm pretty sure I don't like this" to "I'm pretty sure this is really bad". Choosing to take the shortest route by the most major road, I still stop at the historic train station in Qingfeng to discover that the one day a week that they are closed is, of course, today; and, that there's a fine coating of silvery dust collecting on the cable housings that run along the bottom of the bike.

I'm really hoping comes from something relatively replaceable. However, by this point, I'm so close to Puyang and the Trek shop that I grit my teeth and fervently pray and keep going.

This may be a shop named Trek that sells Trek bicycles but it's mostly your average Chinese bike shop with a display floor that's closer to being a pile of really really cheap bikes that happens to have a handful of expensive bikes on racks above the rest.

This may be one of the smallest actual train stations (rather than whistle stops) I've ever seen

Is it me or are these hands upside down? The wrists are all wrong

Considering that my not completely trashed bottom bracket that is rather definitively missing things¹ that ought not be missing ends up missing still more things² by the time I leave, I'm not real sure how I feel about this Trek.

On the one hand his self acknowledged "temporary kluge" to get me to another, bigger city, and a bigger bike shop actually is good and solid for the first 20 or 30 kilometers. As well, once it starts going wobbly, it doesn't go as wobbly as it had been. But, even if this bit was the source of the metal fines I was finding on my cable housings, there's a chance that this piece could have come in useful during the actual repair process³ so even if it was free of charge off of parts in the Random Bin of "This Might Be Useful Someday", swapping it with something clearly not the right size (as a temporary kluge) and then throwing out the original irks me.

However, since none of these bits and bobs ever could have gone missing if that first shop hadn't decided to open up the BB for a look, I save my actual annoyance for them.

While in the bike shop, I take the opportunity to check my hotel options on Maps and even call ahead to a place at about the right distance to ask their Covid testing requirements. They're fine with my officially out of date test but, as I end up passing a test site roughly 2 hours before I get there, I'm actually compliant when I arrive.

Coming out to swab me at a more favorable angle after I barfed

At the entrance to a construction site "if you don't use real name verification to clock in, you won't get paid"

At the same time, I also avoid⁴ answering "where are from" by saying "I'm bicycle touring". It will turn out that the boss didn't realize over the phone that I'm a foreigner, that he actually meant "where are you coming from" and not "where are you from" but, he's a smart guy, and when the Front Desk calls him with "I have a foreigner! What do I do??" although I can't hear his answer, I have some idea of what it is as her next remark is "how did you know she's on a bicycle?"

And, other than a great deal of conversation with the peanut gallery about the room⁵, that's it for the day.

Dreary, gray, not too hot, and—owing to the wobble and it making me a nerve wracked mess—done almost entirely on main roads.

Interesting dragon shaped suspension bridge. (There was a matching phoenix bridge upriver)

Row upon row of quonset hut quarantine facilities outside a hospital

Please refrain from crashing into the high voltage tower

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¹ Possibly ball bearings rather than the spacer the Daming Giant thought was the issue

² The thing which went missing was pretty thoroughly damaged but my mechanic in Haikou (who does a video call diagnosis) thinks that repairs would have been much easier if the missing thing had gone into my handlebar bag instead of the garbage

³ Which, as of this writing, hasn't yet happened

⁴ All they need to know if where I've been recently

I'm tickled pink that a plant which is apparently used for constipation looks like giant turds

Still getting the occasional bed wetting prevention advertisement

⁵ It's a really unique room in the sense of Tolstoy and every happy family being happy in the same way but every unhappy family being unhappy in their own unique way. Obviously, the cartoon bugs and pink sex chair from Guangxi in 2020 will be very hard to ever beat but this place surely gets a number of honorable mentions.

If I had known how useful a crappy looking poorly waterproofed copy of the Form would be, I'd have been using it for years

Sarah's preferred method of checking to see if housekeeping did a good job is to hold a glass up to the light and check for waterspots

Surely they could have gone with burgundy and gold the same as the rest of the room?

Today's ride: 79 km (49 miles)
Total: 1,411 km (876 miles)

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