Panamericana adventure

Today was a exciting day. We took half day off to give our legs a bit time to relax. So we hitchhiked to the main entrance of Mt. Rainier National Park to do a short walk along the skyline trail. As it was very cloudy we could see the shape of Mt Rainier only for a few seconds.
On the way back to the main entrance we saw a mother bear with two cubs playing in the grass. They didn't really care about us, as they were about 200m away.
5 min later we saw another bear eating in the bushes. As it was very close to our path, we kept going on very slowly. At a distance of 40m we waited for the bear to notice us. So we made some noise and hoped that the bear would run away (that is what the schoolbook says) . But he glanced only shortly at us and kept on having his breakfast in the bush. A few minutes later it was finished with the bush and looked around. It seemed to be interested in us, so it walked down on the trail and came towards us. So now I had to decide whether to keep going on doing pictures of the bear or unlock the bear spray just to be prepared for an attack. I decided for the second option since now the bear was only 10m far from us and my pulse rate got a bit higher.
We slowly moved backwards and tried to keep a distance of 10m to the bear but it speeded up a bit. Luckily some of the grasses at the trail seemed to be very tasty so he changed his route and got off the trail. We waited 5 min behind a corner and then kept going as we couldn't see the bear any more. Back at the visitor center we got ourselves a hot latte to calm down a bit 😉 and hitchhiked back to our camp with a nice American lady celebrating her 62nd birthday today.
At the camp, we packed our stuff and rode about 45km to Randle. We wanted to stay at a camp side, but it was members only. So we rode another 8km to a campspot shown on Google. It looked a bit empty, but generally fine with an office sign, running water and toilets, so we pitched our tent and were ready to cook dinner. Unfortunately, a guy (with cowboy hat and bull horns on the hood of his car) came to tell us that the campground was actually abandoned and the owner wants us to get off his private land. So we had to pack up again and cycle to the next camp which was another 17km away. By now it was already getting dark. However, we found Tower Rock U Fish, a nice campground a guy we met at the supermarket had recommended.

We also finished our first 1000km on today's leg. Here is some random stats:
9800m of climb
60h30min on the bike
2 countries
3 passes
4 bears seen
3 dead snakes on the rode
0 flat tires
Many many nice people who gave us advice, food, warm showers and accommodationLäs mer