Because I'm a very clever monkey, when I did all my taobao shopping for Necessary Things¹, I figured out where I would be one full day after Leping and sent them there. Then, because the name of the hotel whose address I used as my package delivery point started with Dexing, I somehow thought I had picked Dexing City and therefore appropriately routed myself on a 70+ km rural route to Dexing as opposed to just over 50 to my actual destination had I stayed on the National Road. Which, because I've not only been away from the bike for a week, but am recovering from the poor sleep on the train, is a more than I'm going to be able to do.

Today was one of those days where I wasn't finding anything I was looking for but I kept stumbling across things I hadn't known were available to find.

My first intended stop was the South Kilns Ruins which I figured were probably just going to be one of those marker signs that tells you Important Historical and Cultural Relics have been deemed to be buried here and if you so much as think of taking a shovel to the ground, we will whoop your ass into next Tuesday. After getting lost in a warren of village lanes that the processor on the secondary phone couldn't keep up with, I decided that it wasn't enough worthy of a detour to keep looking for it. Shortly thereafter, I passed a very faded and quite overgrown sign Welcoming Visitors to the South Kilns Ruins so there must have been something there more recently than 500 years ago.

In any case, it was quite hot and sunny and I was dripping with sweat and I had these nasty itchy patches on my thighs that hadn't yet resolved themselves into definitely being prickly heat rash and not something on the train² so movement that allowed me to ignore the itch³ was really what I wanted.

Really pretty back roads with the kind of blue skies that, even after they've been common for a decade, I'm still surprised to see in China.

Having changed my planned breakfast oatmeal from bananas and sweet stuff to duck drippings after I bought the bananas last night, I had a lot of bananas slowly cooking in my panniers so, when noon came and I hadn't found somewhere for lunch, I sat down by one of the shaded washponds⁴ so common in this area and ate three of them.

Finding a restaurant not fifteen minutes later, I still went in to rehydrate myself, get a meal, and let some of the heat from solar noon dissipate as the who-knows-how-accurate-it-is weather report was saying 39° and the who-knows-how-accurate-it-is thermometer on my cyclocomputer read 50°.

As the day progressed with highlights like women planting rice by hand and stunning rocky landscapes along a river bank, I was starting to get a bit worried about making my endpoint. When I was literally ambushed by a possibly 19th century bridge⁵ as I was leaving Mingkou, my "guess I'll be pulling my headlight out tonight" chances got sufficiently not in my favor⁶ that I turned around and checked out both of the hotels in Mingkou.

Very unimpressed that both were asking 100y, I was equally unwilling to backtrack to the last town where I'd seen a sign advertising more appropriately priced rooms for rural China on the chance that that town's one and only hotel was no longer charging the prices on their sign. So, although one hotel was willing to knock their price down to 90, the other one was willing to let me use their washing machine and had a restaurant on the first floor.

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¹ Like velcro straps to more securely hold the pannier with the now missing bottom hook, heavy duty needle and thread because I don't like the possibly growing size of some of the holes in the blue fabric panniers (which are, admittedly, 11 years old with 18 or 19 touring months of use), a wristband for my newly acquired fitness tracker, stuff like that.

² Unless the a/c struggling to keep up with the body heat BTUs counts as "something on the train".

³ I've since realized, inclusive of wind, all things that cool down my core temp help with the itch.

⁴ This is one of those regions where the locals are not only absolutely convinced that handwashing is better than machine washing, they're also a bit dubious of anyone who would do their washing in a sink rather than a proper pond with a constantly inflowing stream.

⁵ I originally thought 16th century but the archeology professor was having tea with a historical civil engineering expert when I sent her the photos and the two experts say late 19th or very early 20th.

⁶ Five or six kilometers in the dark is okay. Fifteen is not