The morning starts, as mornings often do, with a few leisurely cups of coffee. Taken in the lobby of the hotel on account of my not wanting to haul my crap up to the fourth floor the night before, it is an exceptionally leisurely series of cups of coffee as I had caught a glimpse of a roach's feelers¹ peeking out of my hotplate when I was unpacking things and I had no intention of letting it stay now that it had been discovered.

Had to run the hotplate on high for a surprisingly long period of time before things heated up enough to get it to leave, at which point myself and the teenage daughter of the hotel ineffectively slapped at it with various rolled up magazines and shoes and completely failed to kill it.

Following a particularly frustrating search for a late brunch / early lunch where the surrounding shop fronts seemed to be nothing but hotels, truck repairs of various types, forklift sales, and 24-hour sex toy outlets, I finally found myself a dodgy looking canvas tent restaurant by the side of the road under a sign for a logistics company advertising that they organize partial loads for drivers whose vehicles aren't full.

Once I'd eaten and gotten a video of me getting all excited over the samovar-style hot water pot² the shop was using, it was time to hit a fairly inoffensive³ truck route and head for the city where my coffee beans had been sent.

From the Courier Station where I picked up the goods, I've got two possible routes. The western route, which starts with a minor detour to a hairdressers with Boyfriend's name and then wiggles off into the mountains promises to be the far more enjoyable of the two but I'm not only counting down the kilometres until I get to see him, I'm also getting really close to Zibo City where, in addition to my former assistant Sansa, I also know a handful of media and government people.

Therefore, with the northeastern route putting me on the kind of truck route that's merely uninteresting (as opposed to uninteresting and dangerous) and with there being a whole bunch of towns for lodging, I pick that.

I last nearly 20km on the truck route before I just can't take it anymore and have to get myself off into things that go up, over, and around hills instead of through them and where the volume of the traffic is low enough that I can hear my music and my GPS.

Particularly as, not long after, my speaker informs me that I forgot to give it a full charge the night before⁴ and I need to switch to music played direct from my spare phone, and, even if I had been straining to hear the music before, the truck route without music would have been even more unpleasant.

Entering a part of China where, suddenly, the grindstones are not set into corner walls as lucky decorations to hope for good fortune, but are still being used by people who are manually grinding corn with the neighborhood stone, I'm not sure if this set of countryside roads are actually all that superior in terms of nice rural stuff or if they are just made out to be very very nice on account of what they came directly after. 

The only thing that sticks out in my mind as being truly notable and wonderful about this portion of the ride comes on the cusp of full dark - when I long since ought to have gotten my headlight out - as I dodge a cluster of potholes on a downhill and get a massed gasp of surprised admiration by a group of locals sitting nearby taking the evening air.

Then, with just the littlest bit of a hiccup over my neither confirmed nor cancelled after one hour hotel and a second hotel both unrefundably⁵ saying "yes" at the same time⁶, I arrive in the truck route town of Mazhan, get myself a big bowl of beef noodles from a place whose hygiene levels I don't want to think too hard about after seeing their restrooms, and have a delightfully easy (albeit not legally registered) check-in for a room so nondescript that it doesn't even have anything in it worth photographing in mockery or disbelief.

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¹ I'm not sure when the vile thing hitched a ride inside my Coffee Kit but I remember shrieking as I saw it scuttle across a table near the unpacked Coffee Kit two or three days earlier.

² Currently 329,000 views, 3,703 likes, and 2,456 comments

³ Inoffensive in that the road was a reasonable width, the shoulders were a reasonable width, and the traffic level was not too high. The "Kalvin Cline" Germanesque† architecture that showed up in multiple towns along the route absolutely was offensive.

† "German" inspired by someone who has never been to Germany

⁴ Forgot to charge it at all and had only charged it for an hour during lunch.

⁵ Not actually unrefundable. Just no longer possible to cancel without talking to humans.

⁶ This will later be discovered to be on account of them being the same property.