Separate from my not taking the food pannier up to the room with me the night before, unless you count coffee as food, since I made myself sesame oatmeal with a salt preserved duck egg the night before¹, it doesn't have any food left.

Having gotten into the semi frequent habit of spending weekend nights at Chez Saracita when my bestie is up for socializing, her non-walkable distance from a wide selection of yummy has been gradually convincing me of the benefits of waimai² but I'm still firmly in the camp that believes food straight from the kitchen tastes better, has more variety, and is less likely to be the wrong temperature, so, in my uncomfortably hungry state of mind, it never even occurs to me that I could use my phone and make food appear.

As it will be nearly thirty minutes before I get enough farther into Qingzhou that food options begin to appear³ and something like 10 minutes past that before it's food I want to eat, I rather wish I had thought to check my phone to find out what (if anything) was delivering to my location.

Eating a roujiamo⁴ and a eggy rolled pancake thing full of stuff from some food trucks⁵, and then getting a bowl of noodles I can't finish from a Muslim noodle shop found during the Quest For Caffeine⁶, I'm feeling quite drag ass from the long day and late night and, strongly considering the Professor's recommendation of the "Buddha Trove" that's been relocated to the Qingzhou Museum from the no longer interesting Big Temple Complex about twenty kilometers away, I set my GPS to take me to the closest reasonably priced massage place⁷.

Two hours of massage and two hours of napping later, although I've told the folks in Zibo that I'm probably not making it tonight, I'm ready to actually try riding and I've decided that, awesome content notwithstanding, I'm not going to go to local museum⁸. 

At least until I've been on the road for a while and made it to the city one before Zibo and seen that the local truck roads have generous shoulders, well behaved drivers, and plenty of streetlights, there is still no plan to make it all the way to Zibo. Given how things will turn out with the lodging situation in Zibo and the dreaded "no, we can't take foreigners" that could have been completely avoided if my former employee hadn't tried to make things easier by calling hotels and asking them, I probably would have been better off if I hadn't gone all the way, but I certainly get a story out of it.

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¹ Having not had dinner during the lead up to sunset on account of wanting to get as much riding in as possible before dark, once it became dark I somehow managed to find myself in an area where none of the scattered restaurants stayed open late enough for me to grab a bite.

² Gig economy food delivery 

³ not open at 10am bbq restaurants don't count as food options

⁴ A sort of flat pita-like bread most often stuffed with chopped pork

⁵ for definitions of truck that include moto-tricycles

⁶ Now that Elyse's roaster friends in Chongqing have refilled my coffee beans with freshly roasted, it's pure laziness that impels me to get a Coke 0, except that all the stores I poke my head in have nothing but full sugar drinks

⁷ Sometimes, I mourn the loss of that human connection found in exploring towns and cities and asking shops if they have the product I want at a price I'm willing to pay. Sometimes, I even miss being able to ask people at intersections "what's that way?" and "is it where I want to go?" Most of the time, however, I fucking love that I can look things up online in advance and even have paid for my product before I arrive.

⁸ Knowing that I'll be asking for a wheelchair mere moments after asking for someplace to park my bicycle is a large component of this decision.