The Trans Euro Trail,
and how to ride it.

GoraAdv is not affiliated with the Trans Euro Trail organisation. This article describes how to use GoraAdv as a planning tool alongside official TET tracks downloaded from transeurotrail.org.

What is the Trans Euro Trail?

The Trans Euro Trail, or TET, is a free, community-maintained network of dirt-priority motorcycle routes spanning Europe — roughly 50,000 kilometres of farm tracks, forest roads, mountain passes and the occasional cheeky singletrack. It is curated country by country by volunteers called linesmen who ride, drive, and walk the tracks they publish, then keep them current as gates close and detours open.

You download a country's section as a GPX file from the official site. Some sections include trails that are not mapped on OpenStreetMap at all — the linesmen know them personally, and they put those gems on the line as a small reward for paying attention.

Which ground does it cover?

Sections are published country by country, from the southern edge of Europe up to the Arctic Circle. Be careful with any single headline number: a route measured as one end-to-end line and a route measured as the full network of national sections give wildly different totals, and published figures range from roughly 50,000 to 100,000 kilometres depending on which one is meant. The current country list lives on the official site, and it changes as linesmen take on new ground.

From our side the useful fact is a different one. GoraAdv routes 76 countries, including all of continental Europe, Britain and Ireland, Turkey, the Caucasus and Morocco — so a section that crosses two or three borders is read as one continuous line instead of stopping at the first frontier.

How do you get the TET onto your phone?

As a GPX file. Sections are published country by country on the official site; you download the ones you want and load them into whatever navigation app or GPS unit you ride with. That is the whole mechanism, and it has not changed.

Take the file from transeurotrail.org and nowhere else. A copy on a third-party site is a stale copy by definition — and staleness is exactly the failure that matters when a gate has closed or a section has been re-routed since the file was made.

What the GPX file does not tell you

A TET section is, technically, a polyline. Several thousand latitude–longitude points strung together. That is what is in the file, and that is all that is in the file.

Where will you sleep on day three? Where is the next fuel stop after kilometre 280? When exactly does a day end — at a town, a campsite, or just where your range runs out? None of that is encoded in the track. You have to figure it out separately, usually by squinting between the GPX and a satellite map and a fuel-station database, all in different tabs.

Most generic motorcycle route planners do not help. Their algorithms prefer paved roads and treat the TET as a reference line drawn on top of the map — visible, but not actively routed. They show you that the TET exists; they do not help you ride it.

So riders end up bouncing between tools. The TET GPX opens in one app to follow the line. Google Maps in a second tab to scout a town for tonight's stage. A hotel or campsite platform in a third for the booking. A fuel-station search somewhere else when the tank is the limiter. Then everything gets stitched back together by hand the night before, or — worse — on the side of the road in patchy reception. Each handoff between tools is a chance to lose detail, miss a constraint, or end up at km 280 with no obvious place to sleep.

The other thing the raw GPX does not give you: any sense of what is actually under the wheels. A 220-kilometre TET stage that is mostly hardpack gravel is a different ride than the same distance through technical singletrack. Without surface information you cannot accurately judge stage length until you are already on the bike — and by then it is too late to move tonight's stop.

Planning a TET trip in GoraAdv

The fix is doing all of it in one place, before you leave. One map, one tool, every constraint visible at the same time — track, fuel, sleep, terrain, water — instead of stitched across half a dozen apps in the field. Here is the workflow.

Step one: download the section. Pick a country on transeurotrail.org and grab the GPX file. If you want a longer trip, download the sections for each country you plan to cross and combine them — most riders chain two or three together for a one-week trip.

Step two: upload to GoraAdv. Open the planner and click Upload GPX in the top navigation. A drop panel opens — drag the file in or pick it from disk. GPX, KML and KMZ all work. The track loads on the map exactly as it came from the source. Geometry preserved, no re-routing, no "improvements". This matters: those off-OSM trails the linesmen put in stay on the line.

Step three: split it into days. Open the Multi-Day tool and set Max km per day — 200 kilometres if it is your first long offroad week, 350 if you are fit and the surface is fast. Day markers appear automatically along the track. Drag them to a town if the auto-position lands you in the middle of a forest. The track is colour-coded by surface tier — dirt, gravel, unpaved road, paved, highway — all along the route, so you can scan tomorrow's section visually and shorten a day when you see it runs through technical terrain.

Step four: find your stops. Click each day marker and search the area around it. Hotels, campsites, food, cash, supermarkets, mountain huts and mechanics — eight categories, everything within 20 kilometres of the point. Pick what fits your style and your budget.

Step five: plan fuel. Enter your usable range in kilometres and press Auto-place fuel stops. The planner walks the track and drops a stop at the last reachable station before the tank runs low, then repeats to the end — so you get a fuel plan for the whole section rather than a guess per day. Be honest with the range figure: offroad costs you ten to twenty percent, so 200 kilometres of tarmac range is more like 160–180 on dirt, and the tool says so next to the field.

Step six: heads-up on water. Where the TET track crosses water — fords, low bridges, anything tagged as a crossing — you will see a marker on the line. The popup is a heads-up only; it cannot tell you whether the crossing is rideable today, because that depends on yesterday's rain. Local check before you commit.

Step seven: download the enriched GPX. Same track you uploaded, plus your stops, day splits and waypoints, with metadata layered for whatever nav app or device you ride with. Load it on your phone or GPS, and ride.

What GoraAdv will not do for TET

Three things, deliberately.

We do not host TET tracks. Always download the official GPX from transeurotrail.org. They are the source, and they keep their files current as the linesmen update them. A copy of a TET track on a third-party site is by definition a stale track.

We do not re-route or "improve" your upload. The geometry you load stays exact. The linesmen drew those lines for reasons we cannot see — a private-permission stretch here, a closed bridge avoided there, a beautiful detour the rider before you discovered. Some of those trails are not even in OSM, which means our routing engine could not find them on its own. So when you upload a TET track, we hand it back to you untouched. (For fresh routes you plan from scratch in the planner, the offroad-routing engine is the whole point — the upload flow is the deliberate exception.)

We do not replace the TET project. GoraAdv is a planning tool that works on top of someone else's route. The route is the hard part, and the linesmen do that work for free.

Supporting the TET project

Linesmen are volunteers. The infrastructure — hosting, the website, the file repositories, the regional admin work — runs on donations from riders who use it. If a TET track lets you ride somewhere you would not otherwise reach, it is worth giving back. The donate option lives on transeurotrail.org directly. A coffee a month from a few thousand riders keeps the project moving.

A starting point for the next ride

The TET is the most generous offroad-route project in motorcycling — thousands of kilometres of curated dirt, free, in your inbox the moment you ask. The hard part is no longer finding a route. It is turning that route into a trip you can actually ride this season, this week, with the fuel and the sleep and the time you have. That is what this workflow is for.