>>2234587You are supposed to service the suspension fork every 200km or something like that. Did you just completely ignore that during your trip?
This is the main reason I went with an old rigid mtb, one less thing to worry about. I bought this bike to try bikepacking and see if I'd like the activity, if I did I planned on spending a lot of money on a rigid Surly 29+ bike but it turns out this is not even gonna be necessary, this cheap bike will do the job just fine for my longer trips.
The thing is that in Europe, if you're touring/bikepacking long distance, you're gonna end up doing most of your tour on paved roads and light gravel. No matter what beautiful natural destinations you have in mind, most of the surface you're gonna ride in-between those destinations is asphalt (which doesn't necessarily mean that they have a lot of car traffic). You could probably force your route planning to only go through dirt roads and single tracks whenever available but this would be highly inefficient over long distance and kinda retarded if there are no beautiful sights that warrant such efforts.
Anyway, my point is that I'm ditching the regular MTB knobby tyres and going for touring-oriented ones. I put some Schwalbe Marathon Mondial, pretty famous for lasting a very long time and being very robust. They're doing just fine on gravel and light/medium technical terrain.
