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The gathering is starting for the 90th birthday of the original adventurer.
Long before there was a Restless Viking, there was Da Viking’s old man.
He’s the guy at the far end of the photo.
His trail has included Okinawa, Cold War nuclear exercises, Greenland, remote Alaska, and more than a few places most people would be content seeing in a documentary or on a map.
In Greenland, he once traded a sled-dog ride for a military truck ride with the natives.
In Alaska, he wandered through an abandoned town, found the old post office, and sat there reading letters people had left behind when they disappeared.
There were military missions, Cold War incidents, long moves across the country, and fate did something different in Minnesota, where he picked up a blonde hellion who they brought along for the rest of the adventure.
Eventually the road brought us back to the Great Lakes and Da Soo.
I grew up thinking these stories were normal.
Turns out, they weren't.
A lot of what became Restless Viking probably started with the man sitting way down there at the end of the table. The curiosity. The willingness to go see what was around the corner. The understanding that the best stories aren't found where everyone else looks.
Happy birthday to the original adventurer.
The rest of us have just been trying to keep up.
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Da Viking has been a little quiet lately.
Last year, I pretty much stopped editing videos.
Not because we stopped finding stories. Not because we stopped wanting to make them.
Because editing them had become ridiculous.
We never really had a workflow. We would find something interesting, take off on an adventure, come home with hundreds of video files, dump them on a computer and then I would start dragging them into an editor one by one.
Hours of footage. Maps. Interviews. Drone clips. GoPros. History. Random moments we didn't know mattered until we got home.
Eventually the whole thing looked like an apocalyptic city standing in a swamp of sorrows.
And somewhere in there was a story.
I loved finding it.
I did not love the enormous chunk of my life it took to dig it out.
So a few months ago, I decided to fix that.
I looked at editing tools, production systems, workflows and all the other stuff being sold to people who make videos.
Nothing really worked the way we tell stories.
And apparently... the reasonable solution was to spend three months building my own. I guess.
It isn't a video editor, completely.
It's a system for taking the giant mess we bring home from an adventure and helping me find the story inside it.
Our Iceland trip is going through it right now as the first real test.
And for the first time in quite a while, making these films feels possible again.
So that's where Da Viking has been.
Down in the workshop building a way back to the stories.
We'll see you soon.
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Just so y’all know...we’ve wandered off to pursue other parts of life for a little while, but we are planning to return with more videos.
Chuck is already about one-third of the way through editing a video from this picture. It isn’t Michigan, but it should still be "pretty damn interesting".
Anyways - We’ll see you in a couple of months with something as predictable as a headless chicken wandering through a wedding reception.
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Did you know Poppins has a collection of dolls on display at the Grand Rapids Public Museum?
It’s true.
In 1999, Poppins, aka Martha Meade Hayden donated a collection of nun dolls she had inherited from her grandmother, Martha O’Brien Bunek.
Her grandmother would send a doll, along with $20, to convents representing different religious orders. A sister from the order would then dress the doll in the distinctive habit worn by its members and send it back.
The result is a remarkable little collection preserving the clothing, traditions, and identities of many different orders...and a piece of Poppins’ family history now tucked inside the museum.
It's like a tiny little disciplined family reunion.
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Here's a honest question. Would Y'all be interested in attending a big screen screening of a new Restless Viking video? Cheap tickets, concessions, and a Q & A after the film?
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