Grabow was born in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony. His father taught English and history while his mother was an aquarelle painter. He spent his childhood in Waiblingen, Baden-Württemberg, attended primary school in Untergruppenbach and high school at the Herzog-Christoph-Gymnasium in Beilstein. His interest in tennis developed in Abstatt and Heilbronn, and later he became an ATP-ranked player before starting to travel full-time. Grabow operates a website called greatestglobetrotters.com which invites people to register their own travel histories. He's a Getty Images Photographer whose work has been used by the United Nations and other organizations.
Career
Grabow left home in 1985, at age 17, hitchhiking to Southern Italy to train outdoors year-round. Realizing he did not speak any Italian once he arrived, he started focusing on learning the local language. He did this whenever he traveled to a new country over the next 20 years. His tennis helped him secure coaching jobs from time to time as a way to finance his travels. He worked for SportScheck München, Davis Cup Coach Stefan Schaffelhuber in Italy, and for Robinson Club in Fuerteventura, Spain. There, he met sponsors who financed him on a tournament tour around the world lasting four months in 1992/93 whereupon he earned his first ATP points. His finest tennis hour came when he led then Davis Cup and ATP Top 50 Player Karsten Braasch, who had recently beaten former world number oneIvan Lendl by the same score, at his home tournament during the 1993 Stuttgart Open before running out of steam. He participated in three Grand Prix events beside Challengers and Futures, his highest ATP Singles Ranking being 920. During his travels he was imprisoned several times and almost killed on one occasion. Grabow was deported and robbed, among other misfortunes. He spends an average of eleven months traveling each year, and makes a point of staying at least longer than one month in each country he visits. In 2016 Grabow completed his plan to visit all 193 UN member countries. According to the Nomad Mania UN Master List, Grabow is among the very few people in the world to do so. He has also been to all 50 US States, starting with Hawaii in 1993, and completing twenty years later when visiting Idaho, in 2012. Grabow usually travels exclusively by hitchhiking and walking, but has been on extended motorbike and bicycle journeys as well. He has hitchhiked in all but five countries; North Korea, where he joined a group; Bhutan, where a guide was compulsory; and Liechtenstein, San Marino and Andorra where he drove himself. Both Nomadmania and TheBestTravelled, the two largest traveler clubs on the net by member base, listed him as the person who has experienced more countries, territories and cultures of the world live than anyone in history. Since, the owner of the website had some territories rearranged, and subsequently put himself in front. TheBestTravelled has been taken offline after Grabow reached first position. He was also named one of the top three travelers in the world, and the top traveler in the world below age 50, according to World's Best Travellers by Jorge Sanchez, which chiefly considers 'years spent on the road', even though he is 30 years younger than the two before him.
