Roots
I was born in communist Romania into a white-collar family, the first child of my generation. From day one, life had other plans. I came into the world with one eye completely paralyzed. By age three, I had already been through three surgeries. Years of therapy and muscle exercises followed. And then, as if the physical challenge wasn't enough, came the social one: bullying.
My mother — like every woman in my family — is a force of nature. She taught me to fight back, and she had my back when other parents came knocking. I am who I am in no small part because of her.
My childhood, despite all of it, was extraordinary. Here is the paradox of growing up under communism: the restrictions that limited everything else somehow gave us the outdoors. I spent summers on the countryside with my grandparents — fishing, hiking, roaming free. I miss them every day. That time shaped something in me that no career, no city, no ambition has ever fully replaced.
In high school I played competitive soccer and discovered a different kind of freedom. As a teenager, I stood in the streets with kids my age and helped bring down a regime. The Romanian revolution was not something that happened to us. We were part of it.
The Match
University is where I found her. From the moment I met Ioana, I knew. The match was made in heaven — and I say that not as a cliché but as the clearest fact of my life. We shared the same dreams from day one: kids, dogs, an adventurous life. We got the dog first. The kids came after.
The Match — photo coming soon
The Seed
In 2001, we sat in our apartment with our baby daughter and watched the World Championship of Athletics in Edmonton, Canada. The marathon wound through the city streets. We watched the crowds, the neighbourhoods, the life happening on those sidewalks. Something shifted.
The seed was planted.
In 2003, our son was born. And when a doctor failed to treat him properly while he was fighting pneumonia, the decision became simple: Romania did not deserve us. We were going to Canada.
In November 2004, we arrived as permanent residents. We started from zero. We learned the languages. We had our degrees re-evaluated. We built it all again from the ground up.
Life, apparently, felt this was too easy. Shortly after our arrival, our son was diagnosed with a tumor between his lung and his heart. Benign — but the surgical complications kept him in hospital for months, connected to machines, while we stood by and held our breath. He is fine now. More than fine. He serves in the Canadian military, and every day I think about the country that gave him that chance.
The Rat Race
When everything was finding its footing, 2008 arrived and introduced us to our first recession. The rat race began in earnest. Building a career felt like the only logical path, and we ran it hard.
It was an amazing journey. It was also a costly one.
Eighteen years later, the bill arrived: chronic stress, poor choices, a body pushed to its limits. I found myself at the brink of diabetes — all this life lived, all this distance covered, to arrive here with diminished odds of enjoying the kind of time with future grandchildren that my own grandparents gave me.
That was the moment another decision got made. Balance is not optional. The outdoors is not a luxury. Health is not something you negotiate with later. The clock had been running for fifty years. It was time to run with it deliberately.
How We Got Here
When both my kids were young, I became a licensed soccer coach in Canada. I coached competitive soccer for ten years alongside my day job — partly for the sport, mostly for the time it gave me with my children. When my son decided soccer wasn't for him anymore, we looked for something else. Something that would keep us together.
We found it in the wild. Watching MeatEater and the Keefer brothers — their off-grid adventures, their way of living close to the land — we fell in love with hunting. We got our licences. In November 2017, my son and I headed into the woods for a week-long deer hunting trip, completely off-grid.
We never looked back. Every summer since, we've been in the woods: setting cameras, hiking, picking wild berries, reading the land. Every fall, the hunting trips follow. The popup trailer served us well for a while, but it had its limits. We started looking for something more capable, more compact, more built for where we actually wanted to go.
That search led us to overlanding. The Jeep Gladiator followed. The Wildtek rooftop tent followed. The journey you're about to watch unfold? That's what followed everything else.
The Dogs
Vegas came first. We were living in a cramped townhouse when she arrived — a hound who needed space, a yard, and room to be exactly what she is. Five months after she joined our family, we moved into a bigger home with a proper fenced yard, right before the Covid-era real estate explosion. So yes, Vegas gets credit for that call. Queen of the house. She has earned the title.
Merlot came to keep her company, but his story became something more. He arrived from a shelter, carrying the weight of abuse and misunderstanding. For six months, we worked through his anxiety slowly, patiently, without rushing him toward trust he hadn't earned yet. He got there.
He is, without question, the most loving creature I have ever known. He taught me that trust built slowly is the only kind worth having.
Know. Understand. Do.
As a teenager in Romania, I heard an orthodox priest say something in an interview that hit me hard and never let go.
That became my compass. Not a motto. Not a tagline. A way of moving through the world — taking experience seriously, letting it teach you something real, and then acting on it.
KUD Path is built on that principle.
Welcome to KUD Path
For years I dreamed of leaving the rat race behind and experiencing the world the way I did as a child: raw, unscripted, free. Not as an influencer performing adventure, but as a person actually living it — with my wife, our dogs, our Jeep, and whatever the next trail brings.
This is that attempt.
What you'll find here are real feelings, real places, real failures, and real breakthroughs. No manufactured drama. No carefully curated perfection. Just the honest account of a family that built everything from scratch and decided, somewhere around the half-century mark, that it was finally time to live the way they always meant to.
If this resonates — if you've felt the pull toward something more deliberate, more grounded, more yours — then come along. Watch. Read. Explore The Paths we're walking. Follow the Journal. And if something here moves you to start your own version of this, even a small one, even just one step earlier than we did: that is exactly the point.
Know what matters to you.
Understand what it's costing you to ignore it.
Do something about it.
Welcome to KUD Path.
— Savio, Ioana, Vegas & Merlot
