Sunday Summary #119

Our Great Loop Documentary is Finished

Hi there,

Welcome to Scho & Jo’s 119th Sunday Summary. This edition of the Sunday Summary was written in Atlanta, Georgia.

We just finished our documentary on America’s Great Loop! If you haven’t gotten the time to watch it yet, it is over two hours long, so set aside a night or a weekend to enjoy; you won’t regret it. Working on this documentary was a labor of love and our most ambitious project to date.

Our idea to do something special for the crossing of our wake came before we even went gold in February 2023. Even though we had this concept, we constantly wondered if we should do a typical vlog to keep the videos releasing and moving to Pivot II. It was overwhelming initially, but we decided to keep pushing through. This journey around America’s Great Loop was over two years of our lives, from our late 20s until our early 30s, and we felt like we needed to end it right.

Here are some statistics from creating our final video that you might find interesting:

• Episodes 131 to 413 (282 videos) are featured in detailing our Great Loop journey.

• We sorted through over 50 TB of footage from January 2021 through February 2023 to create this documentary.

• We haven’t taken a day off in over a month, working 70 to 90-hour weeks on this video.

• The video was almost 4 hours long after our first edit.

Essentially, our life for the past month has been this:

1. Wake up around sunrise.

2. Take Ollie for a 2-mile walk.

3. Start working.

4. Take 30 minutes to eat lunch.

5. Continue working.

6. One person starts cooking dinner around 5 pm.

7. We take an hour's break to eat dinner and watch our show of choice (currently Suits).

8. Take Ollie for a 1-mile sunset walk.

9. Continue working until 9-11pm, when it’s time to go to bed.

It has been draining, physically and mentally, but what’s kept us going is the feeling that our Great Loop deserved this to wrap it all together. To this point, we had focused on the daily experiences of the loop. Where we are cruising, what we are seeing, the general plans for the next few days, but the Loop is so much bigger than that. We hope you can see that through our documentary, and we hope that if you were on the fence of Looping before, you make those concrete plans and take the leap!

Next Up.

With our documentary finished, we are officially in the next phase of Scho and Jo. However, we will not just jump into the Van; we will slow down and get back into a healthier, sustainable long-term lifestyle. Jen is getting the massage I promised her when we traveled on our first multi-day hike in Colombia in 2019. She deserves it after this month! I’m going to take a day to read.

Outside of R&R, we will re-institute our work-life balance by taking off nights and weekends, as we mentioned in two Sunday Summary issues ago. I hope to incorporate regular early rises, an hour of daily exercise, and healthy eating.

Boat life didn’t magically stop when we crossed our wake. We have a couple of fun boating videos left and some informative Great Loop videos coming up, so make sure you stay tuned on YouTube there.

We’re also continuing to write blogs on the destinations along the Great Loop - a resource we wish we had when doing daily route planning. Our destination guides are designed to give you the scoop on a town or city in a five to ten-minute read before you arrive so you can best spend your time visiting a place!

Suggest Boating Guides from Us

We are developing schoandjo.com as a resource for traveling on the Great Loop, our van, and the places we visit. If you have any part of the Loop or boating in general that interests you and you would like to learn more about, let us know via email, and we will consider writing a detailed guide on the subject if we’re knowledgeable about it. The guides are free and meant to be informational to help you travel.

The Great Loop Documentary (aka Loopermentary).

Blogs and Guides.

In case you missed it, here are all the blogs we’ve released since our last Sunday Summary:

From the Eyes of Ollie.

I love my walks in my new neighborhood. I liked living at my great-grandmother’s house, but moving into Dad’s childhood home is pretty cool, too. As long as I’m with my family, I’m happy. I always interrupt them around 5 pm because they shouldn’t forget about dinner. I mean, eating is the best thing ever.

Gratitudes

You may or may not know that most Sunday Summaries are written by Jen, but this one is all me. My gratitude is for Jen and how hard and focused she has been on this documentary. We’ve realized the scope of projects like this and have a new respect for people who regularly produce videos like this! This video was an experiment, and Jen was the main driver. Love you, babe 😘

Peace and love,

Jen + Elliot

 P.S.

If you are new to our Sunday Summary, you can take a look at previous issues here or read our big announcement from a few months ago!