The Great Explorer Hotel Road Trip: Bikepacking with a Gravel Bike

Three former colleagues: Sascha, Kristian, and Nico share a passion: cycling. All of them have been doing it for years in various forms:

Kristian has been racing semi-professionally in MTB marathon races for almost a decade.

For Nico, going downhill on the Enduro is never fast enough, and Sascha simply enjoys long rides on the bike.

That means three different ways of cycling, which have increasingly developed in the same direction on joint tours.

Sascha & Nico have already cycled across the Alps four times together – so they're experienced Transalps.

So the guys immediately knew: "If we cycle from Allgäu to Kitzbühel across the Alps, from Explorer Hotel to Explorer Hotel, it will be the
"Transexplorer"."

A new tour was then planned for 2023 – Kristian was immediately signed up to discover bikepacking for himself this way.

Already at a joint MTB weekend with Kristian and Nico in July 2022 in the Allgäu

With an overnight stay at the Explorer Hotel, Nico was so Explorer-infected that he took Sascha's nose out and Sascha absolutely had to go to the hotel too.

The rest is quickly told:
Pizza, 3-4 beers, 2 laptops, the Explorer homepage, Komoot, and voila, our Transexplorer for this summer was ready.

It starts on June 18, 2023!

Sascha and Kristian start by train in Wörsdorf (Idstein), Nico from Mainz to Kempten. From there, a relaxed warm-up for the first few kilometers to Oberstdorf.

Sascha is the one who, at 35, had the dream of cycling across the Alps one day. Back then, he was a few kilos heavier and bought his first mountain bike and began training more or less intensively. It took another seven years, but after intensive planning and various training rides in the Taunus mountains, he finally set off from Garmisch towards Lake Garda at the end of May 2016. The highlight was the Timmelsjoch Pass. Inspired by this experience, further tours through the Alps followed in the years that followed. For the past two years, he has been climbing the mountains on his gravel bike. Most recently, he completed the Lake Constance-Lake Como-Lake Constance loop, with highlights such as the Silvretta High Alpine Road.