During the Summer of the Wheelchair, an ill thought out shortcut across my boyfriend's lawn one rainy evening led to one or more¹ giant slugs hitchhiking into the house on my brace². On account of my discovering the slug in bed with us, there was some serious freaked out screaming that absolutely was not the case with this morning's slug.

Obviously, this guy also didn't belong indoors, but he wasn't actually doing anything particularly disturbing as he wandered around the floor of the hotel room, so, other than switching to macro mode and taking lots of pictures of him, I let him be.

Considering that one of the grosser looking invertebrates with whom we share our world had somehow made it into the third floor hotel room where I'd spent the night, I would have figured, if there were going to be any comments about sanitation (or a lack thereof), they would center on the topic of a slug wandering in circles around the middle of the floor.

Nope.

The apparent mother of the guy who checked me in the night before, upon checking the room to see if I'd done anything that warranted arguing with me over the key deposit, was furious about something related to the bed and the sheets. So spitting angry about whatever it was that I'd done (and I don't think I'd done anything) that she couldn't even maintain her ability to speak Mandarin. Just kept sputtering on and on in mostly incomprehensible³ to me Cantonese before mentioning yet again in Mandarin (that she had to force herself to slow down and enunciate) that I'd specifically been told when checking in to pay attention to hygiene and how could I possibly think it was okay to leave the room in that kind of a condition. Then she slammed open the cash drawer, practically threw a 100y note at me, and stalked off into the back of the building muttering at the top of her lungs about the damn sheets and what kind of a person does that. 

I'd skipped making oatmeal or coffee in favor of translating government notices and the knowledge that I could get another⁴ safe meal at Wallace Fried Chicken while my  digestive system continued to recover from whatever happened to it a few days ago and my feeling kind of hungry won out over a trip back up the stairs to try to figure out what on earth she was complaining about.

Today's ride had substantially more variation than yesterday's. Per the usual, because I insist on visiting the ancestral homes of moderately unimportant local historical figures on my own and not as part of an Educational Tour Group participating in a Patriotic Education Activity, everything but the one museumified building was buttoned up tight and that one was just the sort of wall boards with blocks of text I can just as easily read online⁵.

After the museum, I switched to the other side of the river for most of the rest of the day and got the kind of minor farm roads that are specifically being transformed into signposted tourism friendly greenways. For the most part, other than the guys with fishing poles who can be found anywhere and everywhere and the one obviously under construction Large Site on the opposite banks of the river, I didn't see any signs of tourism. I'll admit though that I spent a substantial portion of this segment focusing inwards and ruminating on how the Toilet Revolution has led to a lot less obvious public facilities.

Bowels eventually emptied by the side of the road, I found myself on an ever wider and straighter route passing by pick-your-own fruit orchards and other such agritainment facilities. The road also gained an official bike path of the completely unrideable variety that alternatively looked cute but would have been unpleasant to try going more than a kilometer on or which had large bollards totally preventing access.

The section with the bollards coincided with the part where plants had not been trimmed back from the shoulder and, as traffic had now appeared, I was honest to goodness fantasizing about calling the government complaint hotline. Then, I crossed into a new jurisdiction, lost the bike trail, gained almost two feet of shoulder, and had the plants trimmed (which added at least another four or five feet of shoulder).

I'm not often one for calling complaint hotlines on my own (that's what Tyra is for) and I could just imagine how much of a headache it would be trying to get through to the right person to formally complain about dangerous overgrowth in a county I was no longer in that I lazily abandoned this idea.

I'm sure that my evening check being an hour plus process⁶ involving the local police, calls to Exit & Entry, and loud proclamations such as "their choice to illegally refuse to honor my reservation means that they have chosen to lose their ability to check anyone else in until I'm checked in" contributed somewhat to my unwillingness to be bitching about plants.

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¹ I only definitively remember the one

² Think "removable cast". Because, with a metal fixation rod running the length of the tibia's marrow channel, there really isn't a whole lot a cast was going to do to help out and something that could be taken off meant I could do dressing changes on my wounds.

³ I get a cognate or three but that's about it

⁴ I also had Wallace for dinner

⁵ Assuming that I'm interested enough to look them up, and I'm not

⁶ Less well documented than these things usually are as I was busy with another round of Notices at the same time