Just a brief update:<\/p>\n
We’re doing well after taking a day of rest this past Saturday in Dezhou City, Shangdong province.\u00a0 We arrived in Jinan, the capital of Shangdong province today.\u00a0 Its been a bit of a culture shock for me, coming into a huge Chinese city after being out in the countryside and smaller towns for the last few days, but\u00a0big cities are\u00a0every bit a part of China as the countryside market towns and villages.\u00a0 We’re on our way to Taishan, one of the sacred taoist\/buddist mountains in China, which is located south of Jinan by 30-50km.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Although biking into big Chinese cities is not my first choice for a good ride due to the heavy traffic and road dirt, we decided to come in to find a good bike shop that has a specialized tool we don’t have, a bottom bracket wrench, to look at Drew’s bottom bracket bearings that seemed to be popping and making noises they shouldn’t.\u00a0 Due to a (lovely) countryside detour today due to inaccurate maps and our tendancy to seek out smaller roads with less traffic, we wound up having to backtrack\u00a0north about 25km to\u00a0Jinan\u00a0City, only to discover on a\u00a0downhill that it’s actually most likey\u00a0Drew’s back wheel (the super heavy-industrial strength one) and not his bottom bracket bearings that has the problem (as the popping happened when he was not pedaling).\u00a0 Sigh.\u00a0 Wheel\u00a0bearings are something we have the tools to deal with, so we’ll disect his wheel tomorrow morning and see what the problem is.\u00a0 Most likely its a bad\u00a0ball bearing, and should be an easy fix.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yesturday we made great time from Dezhou City to Yucheng City due to being the first day after our rest day, a flat good road (though with heavy traffic), and a favorable wind.\u00a0 We usually were riding between 23 and 25km\/hour, whereas our normal speed is usually 20-22km\/hr on flat land.\u00a0 So far from Beijing, its all been flat, so tomorrow we’re heading up into the mountain range surrounding Tai Shan (Tai Mountain) for a change of scenery, and to continue on our way south to Shanghai.<\/p>\n
I’ve been trying to upload my photos from my SLR camera to the photo page, though I’ve been having difficulties.\u00a0 More to come later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Just a brief update: We’re doing well after taking a day of rest this past Saturday in Dezhou City, Shangdong province.\u00a0 We arrived in Jinan, the capital of Shangdong province today.\u00a0 Its been a bit of a culture shock for me, coming into a huge Chinese city after being out in the countryside and smaller […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-here-are-posts-related-to-the-whole-group","category-petes-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}