And unintentional lobster/scorpion #stravaart. 🦞🦂 This is Emily's world and I'm just living in it. 🤣 Sorry. I've been too busy eating all the things (that Emily's taking us to) to write a ride report. I will get back to it later. 😇 Traffic getting to our lake lap was quite crazy but better on a bike than walking (although that’s gotten easier too). The lake lap was pretty and much quieter. Too bad about the smog though. After that we headed across a bridge for the train that’s only accessible by motos and bikes. In the middle of it is an island with a community of farmers on it? It was a first bit of dirt exploring and it was quite bumpy. One section, the dirt was so dry and cracked, it was like riding on individual paving stones. It was around there that we were also deterred by some stray dogs. We found a shortcut that cut off a big chunk of the island loop we were going to do. It was on smoother concrete road which was much nicer. We were changing the route in the fly and sometimes we were on quiet small roads but several times we were on some big busy ones. Most of those were actually okay. It was the busy small roads that were the problem. We stopped off at a coffee place to try some Egg Coffee. We had parked our bikes against a tree surrounded by bushes and apparently it was the “property” of an old lady that was setting up her little food stand when we got there. While we were in the coffee shop, I guess she had moved our bikes away from the bush, maybe leaning them against a moped? Not sure but after the moped left, and I’m assuming they put our bikes back onto the bushes, the lady must’ve moved our bikes again and they fell down. I went out to pick them up and park them on the bushes again. Someone from the coffee shop also saw what happened and ran out to help. They wanted me to park the bikes elsewhere but I couldn’t move them since they were locked. I didn’t understand what was going on at first, that it was this old lady wanting the bikes moved from her bushes. Even as we were trying to move out of the way she was fluffing them up. To be clear, these weren’t delicate plants. They looked pretty hardy. I was pretty upset that she just pushed the bikes away from the plants so carelessly. We moved our bikes to a nearby hydrant. Back to the Egg Coffee. It’s coffee after all so for me, not good. The egg part was an interesting sweet cream. The coffee was a sour and a bit bitter. I tried combining the two but the egg was not enough to offset the coffee. Not for me. We wanted to experiment to see if this would keep me up since caffeine doesn’t normally have any effect on me. We had a really busy small road section before we found some really nice dirt through some farms. There were also really nice concrete paths next to ponds of water. It looked like they were used for growing things, but not sure what, and for fishing. On the way to our next dirt section, since we were navigating on the fly, I was following Emily never sure whether we were going the way we should since sometimes we were on the route and sometimes we were near the route. At one point, we were off route and we made a turn when continuing on the road we were on would’ve taken us to the route. Soon it became clear that we were headed to an Asian dessert place - Emily’s happy place. I’m coming around on them as we’ve had some good ones. I also appreciate her dedication to routing to food stops. It surpasses mine. 😂 Our second bit of dirt was also quite lovely and exited out to a random ceramics district. Our lunch stop was another Michelin Recommended banh cuon place back in the city. It was good but not as good as the place we went to our first night. The air quality was terrible - red, in the 180’s and we were really starting to feel it on the way to lunch. Despite the poor AQI, we decided to take a ride through the old party of the city just for fun to really mix it up in traffic. It’s funny, when I would try to take a photo or video of how dense and crazy the traffic was, it was never as crazy once I got my camera out. Later in the evening we checked out the Train Street from two different places and tried some more Michelin Recommended spots. Had a good bahn mi. The bahn xeo place we went to was okay. Not sure it deserved a Michelin recommendation. Emily discovered, one of the leaves that I tried and couldn’t taste, its flavor component was entirely made up of its smell. 🤓