“The 2011 Mazda 3 is the perfect vehicle for overlanding” – Outside Magazine
“I like my van, but I really wish I had a small hatchback” – Alex Honnold, probably
“…or you’ll end up living in an economy car down by the river” – original line from Chris Farley’s 1993 SNL sketch
Let me start by saying that this was a project of convenience. Jill and I have been tent camping for as long as we’ve been camping. We do a lot of backpacking, so we mostly use our backpacking tents for car camping as well. There is no issue with this per se. However, it’s a little inconvenient on quick missions, where the nearest campground is full or too far away. It’s also a showstopper in the winter, when campgrounds are closed and the effort of staying warm in a tent is so high as to be prohibitive toward the pursuit of other objectives.
We’ve discussed getting a used truck or van, and that may come to fruition some day. But as a quick way to make use of what we have, I decided to “build out” my little hatchback.
Actually, getting it to a point where we could sleep in it was almost trivial. I decided to leave the rear seats in, as I don’t have a place to store them, and I didn’t want to be bothered swapping them in and out for every trip. The floor is almost completely flat with the rear seats folded down, so the only real problem was closing the gap between the top of the rear seats and the back of the front seats.
My solution was to cover the entire rear of the car with plywood and use the center console to support the cantilevered portion of the sheet. I also added hinges so that it could be folded up when not in use. This way, I can store the whole system in the car without limiting the utility of the cargo area, even with the rear seats in use.
The most complicated part was actually transporting the plywood from the hardware store to the makerspace. To do that, I had to build up my roof rack, which I wrote about in a previous post.
We got our first chance to try it out on Memorial Day weekend. Our plan was to camp in Bishop while we rode the surrounding mountain biking trails. And for the first night, it worked surprisingly well.
Not that there weren’t issues. The biggest, as you might guess, was the availability of space. We ended up keeping our cooler outside and throwing everything else into the front seat while we slept in the back. While we were able to manage this way, keeping things organized was a problem. One solution could be to move the bikes to a hitch rack and add a carrier to the roof. Or we could use one of those hitch carriers. But in keeping with the theme of this project, we’ll probably use a cheap plastic bin – at least to start.
Unfortunately, our weekend got cut short. We decided to go to Mammoth bike park on Sunday, and things got a little rowdy. I ended up breaking my collarbone, and we decided to spend the night in a motel after that. Even more unfortunately, that means we won’t get to use this setup much at all this summer. But I’ll continue building on it, in the hopes that next winter will bring more boondocking opportunities.