D7: 袂花 → 博贺

May 25, 2023

Days that lack excitement are perfect for making "on the road" music videos. Starting with a ride through the Mongolian grasslands in 2021 which I set to Hanggai, I've got maybe a dozen of these now and I have to say the time spent looking for distinctive bits of scenery that will look good on a small screen make up for everything else the day is lacking.

I suppose I ought to consider porting some of these videos over to YouTube or something like that but, to be perfectly frank, I'm kind of social media creationed out by doing stuff for Douyin (and the reason I write for here is still for me¹).

Some days, I curse at the GPS for convoluted routes that make no sense. Other days, I get this

I'll breakfast at a reasonable hour on banana oatmeal before hitting the dullest imaginable twelve lane road (including the separated motorcycle/e-bike lane and the raised bike path). The skies are blue and dotted with fluffy white cotton ball clouds and, at least until solar noon, the temperature is also quite reasonable.

It's just so dull.

Even when I turn off the dullness onto a side road lined to either side with ripe lychees, there's nothing much to see. I suspect my headache may have something to do with the lack of ability to find interesting in my surroundings but, whatever the case may be, it's really the sort of area best enjoyed at about 3× my current top speed.

I may have snagged one or two perfectly ripe lychee that were hanging over the road.... but only because I hadn't yet found a place to buy them

Unless of course you count the part where I fell into a hole and scratched my leg up and got bruises all over my body² (and of course that should be counted among the notable events), the highlight of the day is stopping to try and purchase lychee from some farmworkers and getting sent away with all the free lychee I can stuff in my panniers³.

As for the falling in a hole, what can I say? As discovered when taking a step backwards in order to get better framing, the ankle height shrub behind where I was standing when getting ready to take a photo turned out not to be ankle height. From further looking at the area, I suspect it may have once been part of planned foundations for a building that never got built.

Picked a town and a hotel from last year's Tour as my destination thinking that there couldn't possibly be trouble someplace where the police had been threatened with "written documentation or consequences you probably won't like" and had chosen instead to decide that foreigners were in fact allowed to stay in any hotel they like. Apparently, however, I was not a worthy topic of gossip and, after a "yeah, no, not going somewhere else" the Front Desk had to call for a manager... who also didn't seem to have the slightest clue that the Foreign Cyclist in a Hat standing in front of her was the same Foreign Cyclist in a Hat as before but who at least knew how to enter me in the computer⁴.

Oh, so you know how to do it after all...

¹ A large part of why my Chinese New Year ride around the island didn't get journalled was because I don't particularly want to reread my thoughts and feelings at a time when I was mad with panic over a hospitalized friend that had not only ghosted me but also everyone else we knew in common or who I could track down.

² I suspect the crotch bruises are actually from changing my posture for the next 20km

³ This isn't actually very many lychee

⁴ Which, considering that I had to do it myself last time, does indicate that at least some Changes have been made.

Today's ride: 55 km (34 miles)
Total: 510 km (317 miles)

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	1
Comment on this entry	Comment	0