There are certain advantages to riding on the National Road. Advantages like being able to relatively quickly proceed in a forward-moving direction. Advantages like hill cuts, aggressively high quality grading of slopes, and big smooth curves that gently loop their way through the landscape.

As China's expressway network has improved, even as the National Roads have also improved, they've come to have less and less unpleasantness in the form of big rumbling trucks or torn up pavement.

However, the National Road, with it's explicitly defined requirements on all non-grandfathered buildings being set back no less than 20m from the road and it's standards in terms of acceptable plants for beautification, is also boring as fuck¹.

Add to this mix some very wet weather and I can tell how happy I am (not) with everything by how often the phrase "motherfucker" slips from my mouth in response to everything from drivers being dangerous in their passing behavior to my phone screen not being as responsive as I went it to be on account of multiple beads of water sitting on the screen.

With all the scenery nicely isolated in the distance, and no particularly notable waves of development and recession to have left different eras' worth of architecture or political slogans, I don't even have anything much beyond the music from my speaker and the knowledge that I'm absolutely killing it on distance per hour to ameliorate my mood.

Arriving at my chosen destination only to discover that the steeply discounted hotel price only applies on bookings made two days in advance, I'll get a shining bright spot in the form of some nice conversation and a free dinner from the neighboring restaurant. This bright spot and the improvement it brings to my mood, however, is shortly thereafter trampled upon by the next choice hotel who:

1) Don't have an available washing machine despite listing it on the OTA

and

2) Are sufficiently whiny and hand-flapping useless² about their inability to figure out how to register foreigners and their inability to accept help in the not very difficult task of registering a foreigner that they earn themselves the honor of being the first place this Tour where I just take a key and let myself into a room.

In part because it makes me seem like more of an asshole than I actually am, I'm not going to go into all the details of the whole drama, but shit like this is why I hate trying to stay at anything big enough that the Front Desk staff aren't the owners or their direct family.

I asked nicely. I offered help. I gave instructions. I told her who to call. With the police station literally next door, and hotel guest registration being a police matter, I put up with fifteen intermittent minutes of her trying to have a conversation with a manager who was driving rather than the police. I let her deal with other customers.

I was nice. 

Until, I wasn't.

All of this is too hard and she doesn't want to and can't I just cancel my booking and go somewhere else?

Later on, she'd come up to my hotel room along with the security guard, asking that I swap the keycard I'd taken (since I couldn't find the blanks, I took the master) and demanding that I give her my passport so she could photocopy it as this was a "necessary part of my registration".

Giving them the keycard, I explained - again - that China entered the internet era around the time she was going to kindergarten and that my already being registered on the Online Hotel Guest Registration System meant that physical paperwork wasn't necessary. If she wanted it so badly, she could try calling the police at the police station next door and asking them for a copy. 

Then, despite her standing in the doorway, I slammed the door. 

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¹ Considering that fucking isn't boring, one wonders at the origin of phrases like this.

² No offense intended to any of my autistic friends for whom hand flapping is a calming stim behavior.