My name is Anne and I explore the world in a slow, conscious way: Traveling overland. Solo. By bicycle. I share my experiences and inspiration from the road as an author, photographer, and public speaker, based in Berlin.

My childhood primed me for taking unusual paths. I grew up in a village in Southwestern Germany, with a mountain range in easy reach for exploring. My younger brother and me never understood when other children disliked spending time with their parents. We had adventures instead. When we did what others call hiking, we ventured crosscountry. When we did what others called going on vacation, we crossed Europe in our orange VW transporter—sleeping in our bus, our tents, or underneath the stars.

As a teenager, I spent a few months as an exchange student in Brazil—an experience that fired my imagination of the beautiful places out there to be explored. Ever since I turned 18, this is exactly what I have done. Since that day, I was fortunate enough to study and work in the USA, China, and South Korea. I travelled all over Asia, crossed Russia, explored parts of South and North America, ventured out to Africa and kept being on the move in Europe. Relationships and jobs came and went, but the travel bug stayed and has led me to more than 50 countries so far. Reporting from my journeys in words and photos first became a hobby, then a passion, that turned into blogging in 2008.

Sports has played an exceptional role throughout my life. Since the tender age of five I have always played a sport competitively. The form changed over the years (individual to team sports), but the dedication stayed, the many hours of training and competing, both nationally and internationally. Fortunately, cycling was never one of my disciplines, which made it easier for me to achieve one of the aims for my cycling expedition: to let go of all expectations, to ignore the stopwatch and the number of kilometers. This is a journey into mindfulness and observation, not a race to the finish line. Ride along!