A Day Of Firsts!

We put in our 18 miles, walked into a town and before we could even ask, a woman met us on the street and invited us into her hotel. That was #1.
#2- There is no cold water at this hotel. Only water that is so scalding hot that you could cook Ramen noodles in 2 minutes.
We had a nice day. We stopped at a gas station for snacks and water and met a group of young folk. We gave them some cards and one of them told us “Awesome!”
The cards are kind of a hit or miss thing. Our walk really resonates with some people and other people just seem to shrug it off. They tried to give us about 6 liters of water but we couldn’t imagine carrying all of that so we each accepted one bottle, took some photos and were on our way.
We stopped for lunch at around mile 10. I was exhausted. Doug left ordering lunch up to me (I’m sure it’s the last time he does this). I was so out of it that I walked up to their refrigerator and pointed to 2 different things displayed inside and told the waitress “with rice please”. Fifteen minutes later our lunch was served. One plate of grilled green chili peppers and one plate of fried peanuts. It was actually pretty good and the peppers weren’t too hot. We paid our bill, handed out some cards and the owner caught us as we were headed out the door and gave us 2 bottles of water for the road.
A few miles later we met another bicyclist who was headed to Dali. We took some selfies and he and Doug exchanged phone numbers although I’m not sure what they’ll talk about since he didn’t speak a lick of English and our Mandarin is rudimentary.
Doug got to pick our dinner tonight. He was led behind the hotel to a vegetable garden and he got to pick out what we were going to have for dinner. We had squash and green beans and…wait for it…. fried peanuts!