This is very nice. Yes, not like the movie, but I had thought about it, and there seemed no way to make these characters fit into that sort of ending.
Do you have experience with archaeology? I have a cousin who was 'into' the subject when younger, and visited him at a dig, and your description seems on the money to me, and some of my friends from college became geologists, and even their field work was too much like camping for my taste (I'm a mathematician). The cousin eventually became a botanist, by the way.
