I don't know what it is this trip with my ending up on main roads. I swear I didn't end up on main roads this often in previous years. In fact, one of the things I've liked most about the transition from paper maps over to GPS has been my ability to, quite thoroughly, get myself completely lost in the deep countryside while still nominally moving in a forward direction.

Whatever the case may be, I'm going to spend all of today on the National Road. It will be pleasant, as these things go, but—particularly as I'm over 3,000km into daily exposure to "pretty scenery"—it will also be relatively uninteresting.

Although I'm going to feel damn awkward about going inside a not entirely abandoned building that doesn't belong to me and that I haven't gotten an invitation to enter but I really like the part where the old house a few doors down from the one that enticed me off the Road is one that still has Great Leap Forward ephemera¹ painted on its interior walls. 

In point of fact, the glorious arched aquaduct I photograph a bit earlier in the day—with its 愚公移山 slogan extolling the praise of the Foolish Peasant Who Moved the Mountain—is probably Great Leap Forward. If it is, considering just how poorly constructed the water conservancy projects of that period were and how much reconstruction and shoring up they needed by later generations, it should probably count as ephemera but I don't really like to use that term for things like buildings or roads.

I wanted to make it at least to the town of Huangni today (though, passing through the next day, they seem to have no lodging) or even Yongxing County (much as I know that county seats are a risky venture), but I have multiple work stops throughout the day, sitting by the side of the road rushing out a Notice so urgent that I'm doing it on my phone, and even if my liaison hadn't sent me a huge pile of "we'll publish them at midnight" announcements² requiring me to find a hotel on the early side of not yet sunset, there's a guy on a motorcycle who very thoroughly isn't getting the message about me not liking it when his trying to chat with me keeps almost running me off the road.

I am very unhappy with this hotel. I knew in advance (cause I called about a room) that I wasn't getting air conditioning ("don't worry," she said, "it's very cool here at night") but I figured the room would have bedding. Rather than deal with this, I thought let me get dinner first though.

Skipping over the angry hostility I get from the next door restaurant because I want to eat in the restaurant with their other customers rather than take my food back to my room, I'm sitting at dinner alternating bites of food with work when the hotel Ayi comes to stare at me because she wants to lock up the front entrance of the hotel. 

Okay, I'm going to ask her about a sheet and maybe a comforter to sleep on top of.

She didn't know where the sheets are. This hotel belongs to her cousin.

Can you call your cousin?

No.

Why not?

Don't know her phone number.

Can you look for sheets?

No.

Why not?

Don't know where they are.

Can you look?

Don't know where they are.

Yes, but I need bedding.

But I don't know where it is.

I still need bedding. I'm not sleeping on a bare wooden cot.

By this time, we're back in the hotel. With the most aggressively aggrevied sigh you ever heard from a 15 year old that just got told she was grounded, ayi grumps her way to a room which is positively filled with folded cotton fluff mattresses and gets me a single duvet cover.

A single torn duvet cover.

I subsequently took four mattresses from the mattress room followed, about an hour later, by the large fan in the lobby (which, come morning, would cause ayi to knock on the door of my room because she wanted it back).

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¹ I believe this is my second time ever for photographing unequivocally GLF art.

² WeChat Official Accounts, even government owned ones, are only allowed to post once per day. They got around this limitation by having me unofficially post the articles in key groups that were likely to get them shared to the people who neededc them.