Given that last night's dinner was leftovers from my feasting at Wallace Fried Chicken again¹, I ought to be hungrier come breakfast. I'm not though and all I do is make coffee before heading to a historic site just outside of town to check out some Important Revolutionary Era cliff carvings (read: graffiti) that are near to (at least not on top of) some totally unimportant petroglyphs that are probably only five or six hundred years old but whose actual age is unknowable to a nonexpert like me on account of there being no available information on them.

Accompanied by a very large bottle of Coke Zero and blissfully unaware that my crossing into Hunan from Jiangxi will take me out of regions where every convenience store of every size thinks sugar free drinks are the boomshizzle, I get a reasonably priced early lunch while I sit and fast edit the video about that site.

After getting turned around by thinking that the relatively main road where my hotel had been the night before ought to be the road I take towards Hunan, I'm on my way on a small and poorly paved thing that only gets worse when I cross provinces. It's so bad in fact that I'll make a point with 10km left to the main road of deciding to take farm roads instead because anything has to be better than this.

As my decision to take the farm roads not leads me to a building that once housed a shop named Leap Forward according to the lovely calligraphy sign over the door and which was apparently last used as a shop in 1988 (of the calendar still on the wall is to be believed), but also leads to a significant portion of the day's southward travel happening on little roads instead of the National Road, I'm well pleased with my decision.

I don't entirely dislike the national roads. If I had to choose one kind of road to never take it would be the Class Two Highways (which can be county, provincial, or national routes). One step down from being limited access expressways, these often unshaded straight divided roads that cut through hills when they aren't on berms above the land have nothing to see and nowhere to stop, and are only tolerable because of the width of their lanes and shoulders.

In point of fact, because the national roads have a history of being main commercial thoroughfares often dating back more than a thousand years, there's a surprising likelihood of running into something interesting in their general vicinity. However, given my personal interest in marginal landscapes and ephemera, bits of the countryside that have basically been abandoned by anyone between the ages of 15 and 50 are much more to my liking.

If there was anything particularly interesting from between when I got on the main road at 5pm and when I found lodging just past 7 pm, I neither noted it nor took photos of it at the time.

The first hotel I notice in Xinshi costs way too much for the countryside even if they obviously have an elevator. The second doesn't answer their phone. The third, while still more than I want to pay despite having money in the bank again, does.

I intend to dine on Biscoff cookies and milk but my attempts to find milk lead to me finding a reasonably priced dinner instead which, in honor of the friend who has been trying out "interesting refrigerated things" from rural convenience stores, I was down with a surprisingly good lychee sea salt soda.

¹ I can get an air conditioned meal made up almost entirely out of absolutely unlikely to cause diarrhea protein and fat for 30y. Or, I can spend 25 on veggies with a bit of meat and a lot of hot peppers out of a place whose bathrooms don't have soap.