D28: 杏花营农场 → 郑州

July 1, 2022

Safety regulations are written, not in ink, but in blood. Rescue rings seen in the underpasses throughout Zhengzhou

It's a very truck route sort of day. Then, when it stops being truck route, it starts being Development Zone. In short, the only reason I'm going this direction is because I need to get that new bottom bracket installed and, even if I had had it shipped to a small city, it's a crapshoot as to whether I'd get someone amazing like the Xidesheng in Changyuan or someone who merely appeared to know what they were doing like the initial Merida or the Trek.

Although I suspect that my dodgy stomach started with the other day's vegetable dishes, I also suspect that eating the previous night's leftover chicken livers and chicken sandwich for breakfast may be the reason I'm shitting my brains out come evening. Hard to say. In any case, my perpetual level of mild dehydration seems to have kept everything in as it's only once I glug down a full pitcher of ice water that the so-called floodgates open.

A new sugar free Coke product discovered at the start of the day. It claims to be white chocolate strawberry flavor and it almost succeeds.

I wonder when this was last a restaurant

Highlights of the day include finally getting to meet Philipp face to face, a petrol station convenience store with a blood pressure monitor, and the first western food since Shijiazhuang.

Unless a whole day of the kind of roads that make no particular impression even at car speeds counts, the lowlight was probably the bathroom of the same petrol station, discovering that I didn't have enough paper, waddling to the paper dispenser next to the sinks (there absolutely never being any reason to actually put paper in the paper holders inside the stalls), and having some woman walk in while I'm standing there with my shorts at half mast.

She had the decency to do that stiff necked "I'm very definitely not looking" thing people do when they are just as embarrassed as you are.

A particularly nice Road Management and Repair Station gate

Unlike most Transformers statues seen in China, this one appears to have actually been made out of random car bits¹ by the people whose parking lot it's in

For someone who doesn't drive, I've always spent an inordinate amount of time in service stations. Until quite recently, they always had better toilet facilities than anywhere else, and they're also pretty likely to have free drinking water. Starting from this Tour, however, I have a perverse desire to document the random stuff one can find at Chinese² petrol stations.

From FREE CAR WASHES with every purchase of 10 liters or more to washing machines, nap rooms, and popcorn dispensers, there's a huge variety of stuff (like an uncaged parrot, mahjongg tables, or soft serve ice cream) that's not just standard "making drivers feel welcome enough to regularly come back". As well, although the more ostentatiously interesting stuff generally tends to come on the major thoroughfares instead of the rural byways, that's not always the case.

Problem is, I'm already going out of my way to collect so many other categories of weird and wonderful stuff that I feel adding in an intentional visit to petrol stations at times other than when I want to use their toilets would be a huge chunk of time that might not actually get any real rewards.

Maybe I'll convince someone to do it with me when I'm on a road trip in a car. Or, more likely, I'll put it on a shelf and forget about it completely.

Speaking of interesting things seen on the road, although this temple was locked up tight (for Covid prevention and control)

I could still photograph the Qilin outside the temple

I feel (as a dragon hybrid with scales) that Qilin should have a cloaca instead of giant dangling balls and a bunghole.

Although there really isn't anything of great note to most of the riding part of the day, and although it ends with an upset stomach so bad that I have to put off "taking my bike to be repaired" to the day after the day after next, it's a reasonably good day for a day spent entering a Very Large City.

When the road has bike lanes they are wide and well maintained with car drivers who have been appropriately trained that driving in MY space will get them a ticket in the mail³.

I'm not riding on a weekend, in a particularly scenic area, or at a time of day when people commute so the only cyclists I see are a group of retirees on pedal assist e-bikes but even if the car+ infrastructure that's here for me is really here for all the other non car road users, what the day lacks in scenery it makes up for in general comfort levels.

¹ Most Transformers statues that aren't fiberglass seem to involve recycled Industrial Things but, just as obviously, seem to involve recycled Industrial Things from places that have collected large quantities of such explicitly for Public Art.

² Not even just Chinese. Seven years on, the most memorable meal I had in Malaysia was at a Petronas on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur.

³ China has an astonishing variety of traffic infraction cameras from parking enforcement to distracted driving and goes out of it's way via both signs and updated databases on the mapping apps to actively notify you that cameras are coming up and you will be ticketed.

You weren't planning on sharing that salad with me, were you?

Today's ride: 54 km (34 miles)
Total: 1,635 km (1,015 miles)

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