Like most mornings when you wake up and your sleeping bag is much warmer than the outside air (this particular morning it was only 45, but relatively cool all the same) staying in that sleeping bag is much more inviting than packing up your gear and heading on your way.\u00a0 Nature generally does it’s part in helping you however, as it\u00a0did this particular morning, so getting up no matter how difficult was at the same time relieving.<\/p>\n
I emerged from my tent to an orange sun coming up over a freshly\u00a0harvested rice patty.\u00a0 We packed up our gear and made for the county highway we had been following the evening before.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Just before we found our campsite the previous night we had come across a restaurant in the country-side, not far from where we had camped.\u00a0 The red Chinese lanterns had called us in where we had a meal of beans, pork, and eggplant.\u00a0 While eating we talked with various people, a few families, the workers, a pharmaceutical salesman, and a grade school teacher.\u00a0 The teacher was\u00a0named Mr. Zhan, he had a son who was 28, and a 3 month old grandson.\u00a0 He taught in Mandarin instead of his local dialect.\u00a0 He laughed at almost everything and loved to use hand gestures when talking.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As we were mounting our bikes and preparing to leave that next morning he came walking down the road pushing a well used baby stroller with his grandson, and laughing loudly.\u00a0 “Where did you guys sleep last night” he asked.\u00a0 In our tents in that field we answered, it is relaxing, quiet, and free.\u00a0 “Oh there was no need for that, you could have just stayed at my house” he replied.\u00a0 He asked if we had yet eaten, a common question any time of the day in China.\u00a0 We said no but were going to go look for a place.\u00a0 He said we should go with him,\u00a0“dumplings, fried bread, steamed buns, it has everything!”\u00a0 How could one resist.\u00a0 We walked a short way and came across a number of stalls, he was quick to announce to his friends who we were and offer us breakfast.\u00a0 Laughing the whole time and offering us more and more food we ate our fill, as usual for any group of people preparing to ride over 100 kilometers.\u00a0 He offered to pay but\u00a0we were faster than he.\u00a0 He led us back out to the road pushing his grandson in front of him and wished us luck.\u00a0\u00a0He did not have to work that day because it was Sunday, so he\u00a0walked back home to rest.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Like most mornings when you wake up and your sleeping bag is much warmer than the outside air (this particular morning it was only 45, but relatively cool all the same) staying in that sleeping bag is much more inviting than packing up your gear and heading on your way.\u00a0 Nature generally does it’s part […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adams-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57","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=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}