I thought I was making it out of Jiangsu today.

I thought wrong.

I'm not in love with the cheap hotel where I spent the night. I ought to be. Like the place in Jianhe where I spent two nights, it's a courtyard house in a swallowed-by-the- city urban village that's been operating as a hotel for probably 15 or 20 years.

Long enough (not that this is necessarily all that long in some areas) that the rooms have been forcefully remodeled to have private bathrooms, it's got a quirky selection of furniture, a living room instead of a lobby, and an owner who let's me use her washing machine.

I'm also the second foreigner they've had stay. The first, a man from Egypt, sometime before Covid, had gotten registered on the computer but it had been a labor of patience and frustration still remembered years later as an "ugh, I know this can be done, but I so don't want to do it"¹.

Lacking a kettle in my room, I'd come downstairs to make breakfast and was chattered at by an older woman on topics such as when I planned on leaving because she wanted to go clean the rooms. Exhausted from a poor night's sleep caused by an air conditioner whose only "on" setting was arctic, I wasn't even entirely sure at that point that I wasn't spending another night and no amount of "I just want to eat my breakfast" communication (up to and including using my words) could get her to stop picking at me to give her a departure time so she could clean the room.

There are five rooms in total and checkout is at noon. There is no reason for this.

There is also no reason, after going back to sleep for two more hours, when I set my gloves down on the table in the process of getting everything ready, for her to throw my gloves at me as I'm doing a final check to see if I've got everything where its supposed to be.

Despite the tire change, I've got a mushy rear from a leak so slow it might have been singing unnoticed on that tube before I changed the tire. I don't want to spend one more minute with Chatty Cathy grumbling at me so I go find a local bike shop and change it there.

Local shop also rewraps my handlebar tape for me and makes a few other finicky fixes of the sort where I am sufficiently aware of my (in)competencies that I'm willing to just tolerate it being out of whack rather than make it worse by trying to make it better.

Maybe if we'd patched the tire at the shop instead of swapping a tube we'd have used my patch kit and discovered that the patches I've got left² are pre-glued and have a QC issue that's making them not want to stick to the tire even with my glue - which is leaking out the side of the tube.

But we didn't patch my tube and we didn't discover this and I've got a beautiful virginal tube in my tire when a shred of metal wire from a detiorating steel belted radial punctures my rear so badly I've got to do a roadside fix.

I'll just gloss over the number of failed patches before I get one on right and reseat the bead and pump the tire and gather up my stuff and go to flip the bike back over ..... and find that the tire is flat again.

I'm at the job of patching this one fucking puncture for over an hour and then, when I reroute to literally the next town with lodging, another 40 minutes outside the grocery store where I buy water³ when I come out to the rear being soft again.

Around the time of my yelling "no, fuck you, no" at my tire and peevishly throwing my tools on the ground, some guys doing some kind of tractor repair next door buy me an ice cream and suggest that, if I have a spare tube, maybe I should use that.

That was the right choice to be making. Its dark when I get into town and my absurdly cheap⁴ hotel is up a flight of steep stairs but all of today's "tired" is mental rather than physical, so I give it a go and have a thoroughly pleasant experience that includes photos with grandchildren and the explaining why I like places like this instead of places with lobbies and elevators.

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¹ One of the (many) reasons I stay very cheap places is because the front desk staff are pretty much guaranteed to be the owner or the owner's family and to want my money more than they want to avoid the hassle of dealing with me.

² all purpose bought new for this Tour

³ I will purchase just about any kind of sugar-free fizzy drink, yogurt, or ice cream. I try to limit myself to no more than one full sugar electrolyte drink or soda per day. I absolutely hate paying for bottled water and, short of being in a really shitty mood, will do everything in my power to not buy water .

⁴ It was 39y. With a private bathroom.