Two Worlds, One Rider: The Story Behind Spokewanderer

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There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with running a professional kitchen. The kind that settles into your shoulders somewhere around the fourteenth hour, when the last ticket has been fired, and the brigade begins breaking down their stations. It's in those quiet moments, wiping down a pass, listening to the hum of a walk-in, that my mind drifts. Not to sleep. To the road.

I'm a Director of Culinary in a luxury 5-star hotel in the Emirates. I live and breathe kitchens, menus, teams, pressure, and precision. And I ride a Ducati Multistrada 950.

These two worlds have no business coexisting. And yet, here we are.

Riding in the UAE demands respect before it demands anything else.

The heat alone is a full conversation. Summer months here can push the mercury past 45°C, and that kind of temperature doesn't just make you uncomfortable, it makes you deliberate. Every ride is planned. Gear is chosen carefully. Timing matters. There's no casual, spontaneous "I'll just hop on the bike" when the asphalt radiates heat you can feel through your boots.

And so, I ride on my days off, the rare, precious windows between service, planning, and everything a Director of Culinary is expected to carry. Some rides are short. A few hours carved out before the day demands me back. Others are long escapes, where I can finally let the road take over, and the kitchen exists somewhere far behind me.

The UAE gives you stunning riding, empty highways cutting through the desert, mountain roads near Hatta that twist and reward patience, and coastal stretches where the water catches the light just right. But it asks for discipline in return. And honestly? After years in professional kitchens, discipline is the one thing I have plenty of.

This started during the pandemic. That sentence carries weight now that it didn't when I was living it.

I was in Romania. The hotel industry, my industry, had essentially stopped. A job I'd given everything to, gone. And like many people during that period, I found myself with something I rarely had before: time, and a need to make sense of it.

The Multistrada 950 had been mine since June 2018. Long before the pandemic, it had already taken me across Romania, through the mountains, and beyond, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Those were the years of just riding. Exploring. Rarely filming, rarely documenting. The road was enough. From the beginning, I was always searching for honest information about the Multistrada 950, about gadgets worth having, suspension setup, and gear that works in the real world. The kind of answers you only need when you truly own a bike and ride it regularly. But that information was hard to find. Not the lived-in, straight-talking kind, anyway. That gap was always there; the pandemic just gave me the time and the push to do something about it.

Around that time, I came across Pavlin from Motorcycle Adventures and Arthur from Ideal Bike. Good content, both of them. But more importantly, I met them both in Bucharest, and those conversations became something far more valuable than anything I'd found online. Pavlin shared a great deal of knowledge and riding perspective, the kind that only comes from someone who has genuinely lived it. Arthur helped me with something I hadn't thought to look for: how to actually build a YouTube presence. The setup, the process, the thinking behind it. It was a long road and a lot to learn, but that guidance became the real foundation of Spokewanderer. Along the way, Arthur became a good friend, someone I've ridden and traveled with across Romania many times since.

So, I started sharing. Rides. Reviews. Honest takes on gadgets and kits. The Multistrada 950 deserved better than silence, and I had the time to give it a voice.

The road back wasn't straight. In 2021, a job opportunity took me to Germany for six months, something that looked promising on paper but didn't unfold the way I'd expected. From there, back to Romania, this time to Brăila, consulting on a new hotel opening, setting up the kitchen, specifying the equipment, and building something from scratch. By mid-December 2021, I was on a plane to the UAE. The international luxury hotel kitchen had reclaimed me, as it always does.

The pace of culinary leadership in the UAE is relentless in the best possible way. Creative, demanding, deeply rewarding. The kind of work that asks everything of you and gives you a great deal in return. But it compresses the margins. The windows for riding get smaller, more deliberate, more valued.

And maybe that's the point.

When you can't ride whenever you want, every ride matters more. Every kilometer feels earned. You stop taking the road for granted. You plan, you anticipate, you savor the whole thing, from gearing up in your apartment to the moment you finally twist the throttle and leave the city behind.

Spokewanderer didn't slow down when I came back to the UAE. It evolved. Because the story got more honest, about the real tension between a career that demands everything and a passion that refuses to be quietly shelved.

If you're here, maybe you know what this feels like. You're not a full-time traveler. You're not chasing Instagram on a daily adventure. You have a job, maybe a serious one, and a motorcycle, and the constant quiet negotiation between the two.

This is that story. Unfiltered, ongoing, and always somewhere between mymy next mynext ride.

Welcome to Spokewanderer.