This penultimate day starts with an in-room breakfast of the non-meat based leftovers that I hadn't put in the hotel's refrigerator¹. Coming on the heels of the preceding night's feast, it's a far heavier meal than I'd usually pick at this hour, but I really really hate wasting things as good as this. Packing up what little I brought into the room with me, I proceed to the lobby for some cups of coffee and chatting with the hotel owners who—generously—try to invite me to join them for lunch.

After getting bored of the big straightness immediately departing the city and diverging on to a lovely former main road where I'll find a dying main street that hasn't had any major updates since the 90s², I'll spend most of the day on roads that look like truck routes which have not only been engineered above and beyond the current flow of large vehicles, but also have median barriers and sectional speed measuring that makes dangerous passing or jockeying for position a pointless activity.

Although I don't especially enjoy this kind of road, the smaller road that I think I will enjoy is a hellish deathtrap where, rather than crossing the center line to overtake, everyone feels entitled to undertaking in my truck-width bike lane. Hoping it will get better, I endure this for five or six kilometers before seeking a way to reroute myself and not caring that it means dusty and occasionally unpaved tracks with sunset approaching.

As the setting sun turns towards dark enough that I really ought to be pulling out my headlight, I'm back on normal pavement with a barrier warning me that a bridge is out ahead and all vehicles and pedestrians must detour. The efforts people have made to go around the barrier encourage me to try the road anyways and between there and the next barrier I never so much as come across a bridge, let alone one which is washed out.

Headlight on, I point myself in the general direction of the truck route and marked hotels with the hope that I'll find something like the earlier part of the day. Instead, there's a traffic jam so bad that most vehicles have turned their engines off between episodes of surging forward 5 or 8 truck lengths at a time.

Stopping to get dinner, I'm told that this is always the case along this stretch of road and I find myself mapping out a new route to a different end point. It's a good traffic free route of the sort that I imagine to be pretty with the different shades of grass and wildflower in the daylight and, on account of it dropping me off at an actually missing bridge³, it gets me to a road that's utterly devoid of life.

Other than having to figure out how to rig a power bank to my headlight, the rest of the ride into the county of Haixing is quiet perfection. I'm dubious that Hebei will be problem-free as a foreigner and I'm moderately hopeful that Boyfriend might drive out to meet me now that I'm just under 100km from his place so I pick someplace rather a lot nicer than my usual standards. 

This, of course, means that the local police will need a lesson in how to humbly deal with someone who not only rejects their authority but who is also so experienced at rejecting their authority that she called them herself for the express purpose of rejecting their authority. Unlike some of the other times where this has happened, I'm too exhausted to actually argue with them and just grey rock at them from my comfortable position on the lobby sofa until they come to realize that they've lost.

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¹ The deep fried ginger slices that accompanied the chicken didn't really survive a night of cold storage and, by dinnertime, when I'm ready to eat them, they are even more wilted. However, despite the loss of texture and crunch, they're still pretty damn good.

² To the extent that a former department store still has its early 90s advertising murals

³ The original "closed to four wheel vehicles" bridge is still present but, for some reason, the floating bridge is currently docked at a 90° angle to the road.