More main road today. After an attempt at finding shoe repair results in him being closed (should have called that number the night before), I go for a fried chicken breakfast followed by the sort of divided highway truck route that's one step down from being a limited access expressway and is neither inspiring nor interesting in the least.

My rear brake's stopping power seems gone again after breakfast so I tighten the brake pads and make a mental note to find a bike shop as soon as possible.

My only goal for the day is to reach a particular museum where I vaguely had the idea that I might be meeting up with someone who had private messaged me a few times over the past few days. However, despite being quite let down over my not reaching the town the museum is in the night before, they are now not responding so I'm on my own at something which it's probably for the best I not be visiting with a Chinese person.

Hallowed soil, this particular former coal mine is one of the core places in the mythos of the founding and growth of the early CPC. From conditions in the mines to the rise in armed strike busters to the political school where future labor organizers learned to read and write, it has so damned much potential to be fascinating. It does not, however, manage to achieve this potential.

A good museum should take a subject people aren't necessarily interested in and make it into something that engages them into wanting to learn more on the topic. For example (and I know it's not fair to use a Smithsonian as a point of comparison), the Udvar Hazy Air and Space Museum. As a non engineer, you'd think my brain would have been full up with airplanes after an hour. Instead, I believe the reason we left after more like 5 hours is because the people I was with (who didn't have the good fortune to be able to use museum wheelchairs) were complaining that their feet hurt 

Most of the Revolutionary Museums I've been to in China take a fascinating historical subject and present it in such a dry and uninteresting fashion as to make me wonder why I bothered going when I could have just read something online. After the air conditioner, I think the original dioramas and statuary from the 1968 opening of the museum in all their mawkish sentimentalism were probably my favorite part. There was also a stunningly powerful painting that, if anyone had bothered to think about little things like installing benches, I probably could have spent quite some time staring at.... not because of the historical nature of the subject but because it was just that damn good of a painting.

Leaving the museum, I follow the GPS where it points me on my way to the border with Hunan. I won't actually cross provincial borders until the next day but this particular town is the most reasonable next spot in the right direction shown to have lodging.

Taking me first on super main road and then on super not main road, the fact of it apparently being a perfectly ordinary town on a perfectly ordinary road leads me to believe that the GPS has been doing that thing where it picks the shortest distance by a few hundred meters. I'm not complaining about this at all as, despite the scary steep downhill from a small local reservoir leading me to tighten my rear brake again, it sure is awfully pretty riding that more than makes up for the doldrums of the earlier roads.