This startup makes it super easy to go camping

If you’re waking up in Bolton Landing this morning, it’s probably around 58 degrees in the upstate Adirondack town on the banks of Lake George. Should you be camping there, you’d be waking up to towering pine trees, light glinting off the water and mountain hiking trails waiting for you.

But where will you be? In your Brooklyn apartment, probably, cranking the A/C at max so the sidewalk-melting heat of city summer doesn’t make your bedroom so appallingly swamplike you can’t sleep.

This is the problem Ashwin Krishnaswamy set out to solve with his new company, Ashwinn’s Upstate Roaming Co. It’s like Car2Go but it’s a Jeep full of all the camping supplies you and your friend need for a weekend in the outdoors.

For $275-$375 a night all summer, you can have the Jeep Wrangler delivered to your apartment and picked up at the end of the weekend. Krishnaswamy even has campsite recommendations.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Ashwinn's Upstate Roaming Co. (@roamingconyc)

“Last summer some friends and I took a camping trip to the Adirondacks,” Krishnaswamy explained in an email. “It almost fell through because only a couple of us had the gear, so we spent nearly two months before planning out logistics in a spreadsheet — who’s going to get cars, who’s buying what gear, etc. It was a real pain, and now a bunch of us also have this random camping gear we rarely get to use.”

And so Ashwin’s Upstate Roaming Co. was born.

“After the trip I was talking to my friend Aneesh and we were just like, wow what if you could just rent a car with all the gear you needed? Make it really easy and take care of all the logistics that are usually barriers for people to do this kind of thing,” he wrote.

Krishnaswamy said the company is still very much a passion project. Aneesh, his coworker at Manhattan startup Ense, helped him build the site, but operationally it’s just Krishnaswamy hopping around in the jeep and getting the supplies cleaned.