Since we worked to pay our own way through college, we found great difficulties in finding realistic internship opportunities to improve our resumes while attending college. I’m sure my wife and I could have found internships, but they would have required not seeing each other through the summer breaks, not making enough money to pay our rent, and having to workout the nearly impossible details to keep our pets housed and fed. Volunteer internships or internships with low monthly stipends were just unrealistic for our situation.
Straight out of college we decided to take a job planting Long Leaf and Loblolly pines in South Carolina. This job pays $100 per day starting out, and $150 once the techniques are mastered and production increases. We found the ad on Craigslist, and had made arrangements to start at the beginning of January, after our Suzuki Samurai’s diesel conversion was completed. I’m going to leave out all the cruddy details to make a long story short. The mechanic working on our Samurai obviously was not going to get the vehicle ready in a timely manner. The vehicle still is not ready, and the shop has had the diesel conversion completed for nine weeks.
We received a call from our tree-planting boss informing us we needed to show up, or forget about the work because the planting season would be coming to an end soon. We had already got rid of our residence, put our passions in a storage unit, and invested in off grid camping gear to be prepared for the work camp conditions. The boss man said we could manage to get taxied from camp to the planting grounds, so we changed our plans, purchased the appropriate parts to install our roof rack on our 2012 Nissan Versa Hatchback, and loaded the Versa with all of our camping gear.
Using the Versa for car camping meant we could not drive ourselves to the planting grounds due to lacking four wheel drive, but the Versa was entirely capable of hauling the gear we required for survival. We loaded the Versa down a day early to ensure extra time if we had any hiccups, and to enable an early departure when we were ready to move out to work camp near Fort Jackson, South Carolina.
We did not expect the first load-out to take all day, but indeed we were still loading the vehicle after dark. After moving camp several times we have knocked our time down to a little over an hour to get everything strapped in place on the roof rack, and inside the car. Packing up our camping gear only takes about 30 minutes, but fitting everything in a small vehicle takes time, organization and finesse.