Sunday Summary #139

Playing catch up after our Maiden Voyage 💨

Hi there,

Welcome to Scho & Jo’s 139th Sunday Summary. This edition of the Sunday Summary was written on i-95N as we head to Elliot’s Dad’s house for the Super Bowl!

Last Week.

It has officially been ONE MONTH living in Summit 🎉! It honestly felt like a few months in one, and that’s one of the things we love about traveling; time seems longer, probably because every day is very different.

Once we got home, we enjoyed time with some family and returned to van prep mode. While the last thing we really wanted to do was more projects, we needed to buckle down and finish everything that remained. Here’s all we accomplished:

1. Installed our Stealth Curtain from The Wanderful. This is a curtain in between our two cabin seats and serves as a privacy wall, a thermal break, and makes our living area feel more like a home and less like a vehicle.

2. Fixed the leak in our shower. Where our shower drain left the van, we had a tiny leak! Fortunately, the water didn’t pool on our floor, but it still needed to be fixed. Jen and I took it all apart and were able to fix it with some marine sealant 😅

3. We added a spare tire! This was a huge addition and one needed before heading to Alaska. For some reason, the outfitter deleted the spare tire from the van. And when I say deleted, I mean deleted… At the Mercedes dealer, they couldn’t even quote it because it wasn’t on our VIN, and when I went to install it on the used rack, the welded connections were missing from the van! Luckily, I figured out a solution, but it was a wild ride!

4. Some small quality-of-life changes, like a new reading light over the salon, organized our garage and tightened up some drawer fronts.

We weighed our van in November just before starting our shower. We were 8,600 lbs, and the max weight for our van is 9,050. Afterward, we loaded the van, filled our tanks, built our shower, headliner shelf, and a few other projects. One of our going out West tasks was to get weighed again, this time fully equipped, and….. we were 240 lbs over capacity. So we’re leaving our large dumbells at home (115 lbs) and will reduce, reduce, reduce. We’re measuring everything we take out and then will see if we need to drop some of our 70 gallons of water, which collectively weighs over 580 lbs 😅 I think we were spoiled on the boat!

This weekend we just finished filming our Van Tour. We are thrilled to show our last van build video. It has been 8 months since we broke ground and cut open our Flarespace flares as the first project in our van build. We’re excited to show you how it all came together!

This Week.

Since Van projects and filming were the goals this week, next week we’re cleaning 🙈 After not traveling for over a year, we accumulated quite a bit of stuff. This week, we’re organizing, decluttering, and putting our last final belongings away before hitting the road. We will be asking the Marie Kondo question…. “Does this bring joy?” Hopefully (🤞), this is our last week in Florida. After over two years in the state, we’re ecstatic to see what the rest of this country and Canada have to offer!

Videos.

We’re hard at work editing our full van tour video, so stay tuned for that one! In the meantime, here are all the vlogs we’ve released since our last Sunday Summary:

Blogs.

Here are all the blogs we’ve released since our last Sunday Summary:

From the Eyes of Ollie.

We stayed at our first National Forrest last week, and I heard something I’d never heard before… Coyotes! They were howling really loud at midnight. I kept looking for them all night, but I didn’t see any… maybe next time!

Gratitudes.

Today, we’re leaving our family in Viera, Florida, which epitomizes why we built Summit. We could stay in my Grandma’s driveway and spend two nights with family, traveling with our home and office. While on our boat, we missed some family events and the sense of community that comes with that. Living nomadic in a van will also have its challenges, but we’re grateful this weekend worked out!

We hope you have a great week! See you next Sunday ☺️

Peace and love,

Jen + Elliot

 P.S.

If you are new to our Sunday Summary, you can take a look at previous issues here.