First off, thank you to all of our family, friends, and followers that have caught up with our journey around the world last year!
As you may or may not know, Jenn and I had a pretty routine life before our trip. We studied at a good high school, worked to get good degrees from undergrad and then I worked in corporate IT while Jen worked as an Architect before going back to school for her masters. It was a normal 9-5 job, saving any extra funds to pay off student debt, and trying to make the most of any free time! I don’t think it’s possible to take a trip like we did last year and just go back to how things were. There’s too much life to live.
The idea for “Scho and Jo” (short for Schoenfeld (my last name) and Johnson (Jenn’s last name) first came about in New Zealand when we were traveling with Luke and Carol (Jenn’s parents) in a camper van and we stopped at the farmer’s market in Dunedin, NZ. There was a small trailer there that was selling coffee, and homemade bagel sandwiches. We thought to ourselves… what if we bought a trailer and sold coffee throughout the US as we traveled! Thus Scho and Jo(e) was thought of.
Fast forward, 3 months after COVID hits and we are spending time in India as we are imprisoned in our hotel. We spend the time catching of on videos (of course) but also reflecting on what the last 10 months have taught us. We came to the realization that we wanted to continue living life like the past 9 months, and live it to the fullest. We still need to earn livelihood, but why not do it in a way that brings joy each and every turn.
Thus we decided to go all in, and with this new initiative, Scho and Jo was born. With Scho and Jo, we will be documenting our life as we try and live creatively. We don’t know where it will go, honestly, for example, with no boating experience who thought we would buy a 32 year old trawler and tour the Great Loop?
We hope you stick around and enjoy follow as we share the highlights along with the missteps, a real journey trying to find our way through life.
In this blog post, we share our total expenses as we traveled around America’s Great Loop in one year. After sharing detailed, month-by-month expenses, we have totaled up the past 12 months in this post. By sharing our monthly Great Loop expenses, it will inspire prospective loopers that you don’t need to be retired or a millionaire to go on this journey of a lifetime.
A large part of cruising on America’s Great Loop includes traveling on waterways with locks. In this post, we discuss how to lock a boat and all of the tips and tricks we’ve learned along the way. We go over locking gear, the Five Steps to Locking, locking agencies, unique locks on the Great Loop, and more!
In this blog post, we share our monthly expenses as we travel around America’s Great Loop – a 6,000 nautical mile journey around part of the US and Canada by boat. As a young couple on a budget, we hope by sharing our monthly Great Loop expenses, it will inspire prospective loopers to going on this journey of a lifetime.
For our second to last month on the Great Loop, we came in high for our January Great Loop Budget! Included in this report are what expenses to expect on the Great Loop to how much we spent exactly in one month. Spoiler: our second largest expense this month was boat projects.
In this blog post, we share our December Expenses on America’s Great Loop. From affordable marinas to getting a free boost of speed going down the Tenn-Tom thanks to some recent rain, we were able to stay fairly close to our monthly goal budget.
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