Hi everyone!

We’ve survived our first two days of cycling through (A)merica! Just 80km done since Seattle, but we’re slowly warming up and will do 60 today, from Shelton (where we are now) to a campground in Lake Sylvia State Park.

Last night we slept at a motel, something which was on our to-do list for real American experiences. So far, the cycling itself has been light, so we’ve had time to adjust to the bikes and to the country we’re cycling through. It’s our first time (as adults) visiting the USA so we’ve been having fun spotting some American stereotypes or, in contrast, busting some of them. We’ll list our one major finding and three smaller ones down below.

1. People have been incredibly friendly

So far, we’ve had nothing but positive encounters with everyone. From our incredibly helpful AirBnB host Laura, to people who stopped to casually chat with us at a supermarket: all of them have shown nothing but a genuine interest and friendliness. Even traffic is much better than we’d anticipated. Most cars (~80-90%) really takes an effort to swerve around us when we’re on our bikes.

2. Washington state is so green!

This was what surprised us even before the plane landed. Even Seattle is just so incredibly green, as in, there are big trees everywhere! It makes it so beautiful to cycle (or, we suppose, to drive/walk) through. The moment we took a ferry to Bremerton this only got better. It’s just beautiful out here!

3. American flags everywhere

It seems as if everyone here wants to make sure of one thing: you shall not forget which country you’re in! Seriously, even when we had some Asian food yesterday, amongst all the typical decorations they just HAD to hang an American flag. And we’re not even talking about the many signs we’ve seen in gardens and other places with texts such as “god bless America”!

4. Neon signs

Okay, this is admittedly a very small one, but it’s quite noticable. What’s up with all the neon open/closed signs in shops?

Right, so much for our little cultural analysis. Next time we’ll come back with more videos as well. We just found out we cannot easily transfer videos from our good camera, so until then we’ll stick to action camera shots and photos. Be sure to check out our Flickr page as we just threw a whole bunch of photos on there!