I'm kind of sort of teasing Udo and Vlad, the never-met-in-person bike friends in Jiangsu whose city I didn't detour to go visit because I had pared excess loops of ridiculousness off of my route, but I'm also kind of sort of serious when I say: "I thought I had the mid-Tour doldrums, but it actually turns out that Jiangsu sucks."

Taking a carefully waypointed rural route that mostly parallels the truck route that I'm mercifully not on, I will spend my day on a variety of short but steep climbs through small villages where I periodically get to look down and across sweeping vistas that aren't especially what anyone would call "majestic" but which are made majestic after the time in Jiangsu where everything was flat and nothing had much variation in architecture or style or building materials.

I've now passed through bits of the province in question six times¹ and I'm increasingly getting the impression that, while it might be an okay place from which to start a trip and get back into the habit of exercise, there's only so much interest one can have in grids of roads punctuated by various sizes of canal.

Also, unlike parts of the country where travel from A to B wasn't as easy a hundred years ago (or fifty), while there are the occasional bright spots of Something Different, there's a sameness to the buildings and building materials that sucks the joy out of going new places.

In Shandong, however, while I've yet to have anything quite so interesting² as the tile poster³ on Admirable Behavior⁴ that I saw just before coming in to Junan the night before, I've got variation. There is up and down. Cracks in the road. Patches. Different grades of paving. Multiple types of construction material used in the same village. Multiple kinds of construction material used on the same house. Corn and tobacco and seven kinds of trees and three different ways of planting vegetable gardens.

Given my particular interest in ephemera and the ongoing existence of things that oughtn't still be around, my highlight of the day (and one of my highlights of the Tour) is a barely legible wall slogan on developing getihu and the non-collective economy that probably dates to the late 80s. Rather like the one on the benefits of reforming the rural electricity supply policy (1998) seen a few days before Hangzhou, it's not that there's anything that amazing or interesting about the content⁵, it's that—like the now faded sign coming into Wuxi that tells me to stop and show my 24 hour validity NAT—it hasn't been removed and it still exists in situ.

Seeing that the route past Ju County and on towards the place Elyse's roaster friends in Chongqing have sent my coffee beans to requires me to get on the truck route for a bit, I wanted to knock out another 15km before calling it a day but the hotel bookings all time out and I instead pick a place on the far edge of town where there are some complications over my being a foreigner and some whinging over the "you honor my booking or you pay the cost of not honoring it" that, like so many other times of putting up even the slightest bit of resistance, quickly turns into amazement at my incredible ability to navigate the computer and posed pictures with the children to show off to all the friends and family that We Had A Foreigner Visit Our Hotel.

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¹ 2006 Shanghai → Suzhou, 2008 Haikou → Beijing, 2015 Shanghai → Shenzhen, 2017 Shanghai → Chongqing, and 2019 Shanghai →Haikou

² While it's true that Chinese firefighters are technically a branch of their military, I've never before seen them depicted wearing camouflage print!

³ I used to call these mosaics but—particularly as they often have mass produced printed designs on them—they aren't, not really

⁴ I've seen multiples of the Resist Evil Cults both in vandalized and non-vandalized forms and I've got a new variant of a classic Family Planning Policy poster that I've seen in a few other provinces but this has one has remained elusive.

⁵ I'm lying. The reform concepts that went into allowing the existence of getihu are downright fascinating.