Dana und Martin

 

We are Dana and Martin have been writing and self-publishing ( MDMOT ) travel books since 2006.
To this day we have many different travel books on the market in the areas of: off-road, street motorcycles, adventure (travel enduro) and mobile homes as well as snow truck (larger 4x4 vehicles).
Our new project, which we would like to present on this website www.4x4Europa.de, is a journey on and off-road through the whole of Europe. For this we bought a Suzuki Jimny and converted it into something.

 

Who are we both:

We Martin and Dana met in a big company where everyone had their own job. As luck would have it, we both come from engineering backgrounds, Dana comes from technical drawing, I come from engineering in general.

Right from the start, our passion was traveling by motorbike. The first trips were road tours with heavier travel enduros with short detours on unpaved roads. The Maritime Alps were visited in autumn and the Spanish Pyrenees in early summer. Dana also got her motorcycle license and chose the Suzuki range.
Since I used to ride motocross, it quickly became clear to both of us that we should increase our travel radius and travel the deserts of North Africa with smaller enduros.
In the winter, every free minute we had was drawn to North Africa, where we drove a number of times with KTM, Suzuki and Yamaha.
Dana always rode Suzuki (DR350 + DRZ400 + DR250) and I rode it (KTM 600, Yamaha WR450, Yamaha TT600r, KTM EXC 400, KTM 640, KTM 690).
We loved the desert and our trips in areas without civilization got longer from year to year, that meant bunkering fuel + water for at least 2 days in the desert, a 180 kg enduro was often 250 kg heavy. We like to think back to this time and are "annoyed" that we took far too few photos. But over time, the political situation in North Africa became more and more difficult and then only Tunisia or Morocco remained. Tunisia became one of our well-travelled winter destinations where we (almost) no longer needed GPS for navigation, as we were very familiar with the sandpit.
In 2006 we came back from Tunisia and wrote down the tours we had done on a few sheets of paper and tried to sell them for a few euros. That was the beginning of our second appointment.
We were looking for a company name (M)artin (D)ana (MOT)torrad, in retrospect probably not one that is easy to remember.
And just like that, our hobby turned into a small business.
In the years that followed, we spent every free minute planning and driving off-road routes. Sometimes we set off on the motorcycle after work on Friday, drove 600 km to ride 1-3 off-road routes on Saturday. Then home on Sunday, back to work on Monday.
This continued from 2006 to 2011. But then it became more and more difficult for us, we had to update routes, find new routes and then work at least 40 hours a week.
We talked to our employer and we were able to reduce the 5-day week to a 4-day week and when that was still not enough for us, we were allowed to work 1 week and have 1 week off.

From 2016 the time had come, we parted ways with our employer and only worked for our books. We knew we'd never get rich with it, but we'd be happy if it was enough to live on. The change from no longer being an employee and now only being responsible for yourself was not difficult for us, we had often dealt with it in advance, played through different scenarios of how it could be and the most important thing is that it is enough to live on ? to travel? to do our job? Can we "just" get along with the two of us? Now 6 years later we can say "yes".

Not much has changed until today, we try to keep our books up to date, the only thing is that we are not only on the road with the motorcycle but also with a 4x4 vehicle.
We wish you Dana and Martin a lot of fun browsing our website!