Camping is camping...

OK, any time you can get out of the house and enjoy the great out doors is a good time, and it can always teach you something.  So i never pass up and opportunity to get out.

Now maybe its in the middle of nowhere, out roughing it with the Boy Scout troop.  Or maybe its at the local park for a community campout with free hotdogs and smores.  Either way, i have never had a "bad time" and i've never come home having not learned something that will make me better prepared for a crisis.  Heck, it can even be fun to pitch my tent in my yard and spend the night outside.

Part of the exposure of being in a urban setting is you never develop "woodsman" skills.  Survival is innate, but the skills to survive have to be developed.  Now i may not be Bear Grylls, but if i have to live outdoors after a crisis I know i have the skills to do so, with or without all my gear.

Anyway, my only point is I don't make such a big deal out of it.  I don't have to go far, or have some great plan, sometimes we just go.  Leave the HDTV, cell phone, XBOX and high speed internet behind, and spend time outside together as a family.

Never quit improving

My little camping trailer / bug out trailer has undergone some major changes and improvements in the last few months and now i have finally realized the vision I saw when I first drug it from under the weeds and debris many months ago. 

The bearings have all been repack and the bottom has been undercoated, its been completely rewired and new safety tow chains installed.  But the biggest and most dramatic change has been i finally got around to a much needed paint job.  The original white paint was sun bleached and weather beaten, it was so chalky it would come off on your jeans when loading and unloading.  It was just dead paint.  It was time for it to go.

After working out all the details and getting the propane storage tubes installed, and drilling and mounting the attachment system for roof top bag, not to mention researching a bunch of different ones to find the right solution for the curved top, she was finally ready.

My original plan was to go black, but when i saw Rustoleum's line of camouflage paints, I was inspired.  I sanded it down to rough up the surface, and shot a coats of their self etching primer.  Then laid down two coats of the Camo army green.  I cut out a dozen camo blob shapes from cardboard boxes, keeping both the shape and the outline.  Then over the course of two weeks I layered on both shapes and outlines using the rest of the Camo paint line varying the distance and intensity to fade some out, to blend some shapes together, and to overlap.   

I also picked out a few plants and sprigs and layer then on then dusted over them with paint to reverse shadow their leaf pattern.  The whole focus is to make it look like anything other then a trailer at a distance, and since "God doesn't paint in straight lines", I paid close attention to the corners.  I wrapped darks colors around them and at the bottom to break up the sharp visible edges and fool the eye with shadows. 

A quick wet sand, and then two coats of matte clear and she is all set for the summer camping season. So is it invisible? Not hardly, but it sure looks a lot more fun, and if I pulled it into a wooded area and placed it at the tree line then toss a Camouflage net over, is it a heck of a lot less noticeable then the big white box it use to be? ABSOLUTELY!

Now originally it had about 33 Cubic foot of internal storage space.  Quite a lot when you consider I keep all my camping and survival gear inside and ready, so this essentially IS my bug out solution.  Some people grab a bug out bag, I hook this baby to the back of my F150. But the addition of the tubes added the capacity to carry 16 one pound propane tanks outside of the main compartment.  If I were warming up a tent in winter camping, thats 30 day worth of fuel.   When the tanks were inside they took up about 2 cubic feet of space, but now their new location allowed me to reclaim that for other gear.  

The roof top travel bag is the Rola carrier with 12 Cubic feet of space.  Its positioned high, so i'll only put sleeping bags and other light/soft gear inside it keep the center of gravity low on the total load.  Again, I was able to reclaim the internal space for heavier gear.

Now, i'm slowly reorganizing my camping and survival gear to pre-stage much of what I need at the ready, and every time I pull it out for a weekend trip, I find a place for improvement.

Mobile Solar testing

I was working on my camp trailer the other day and ran a little test of my mobil solar power system.  Solar can be as complex or a simple as you want to make it.  You can get all tied up in amps, kilowatts, megajoules, and whatever, or have a little solar powered flashlight or phone charger.  Its all about capturing the sun's power for later and creating silent electricity.   For me, I'm keeping it as simple as possible, while still getting as much power as I can.  I've stayed away from inverters and all the complex stuff and focused on the 3 basic components... Generation, storage, and distribution.

I already went into detail about my distribution system, but in a nut shell, I have 12 volt cigarette plugs on long cables to distribute power around my campsite from the trailer.  Then i made sure to get cigarette plug adaptors for all my gear.

For storage i went with the biggest deep cycle marine grade battery i could find.  I got a good deal on a Durracell at Sam's club, and mounted it in a battery box in the front compartment of my trailer.  The Marine grade batteries are designed to take a pounding and to endure the moisture and extreme conditions of boating, so they are the perfect choice.

Now for generation i have an 100 watt Instaspark folding solar panel,  its rugged briefcase design works well for travel and the compartments on the back hold the alligator cables to attach to charge any battery.  It also has a built in charge controller.  I popped it up in the driveway and it quickly topped off my battery.

I can't run a house on it, but its perfect to charge batteries for flashlights and communication gear, and I can run goal zero lights directly off of it to have light in camp.

Bug out vs Evacuation, and some realizations

Excuse this posts format, but its more my ramblings on how to address and adjust my evac plan.  By writing down my thoughts I'm thinking through and clarifying my ideas.  I'm not crazy, and maybe it will help you too.

First, if you're reading this you probably know i'm not a huge "bug out" fan.  I mean I have racked my brain and still haven't come up with a situation where I need to leave in 5 minutes.  I even thought about every disaster movie I could, and the closest I could come up with was "War of the Worlds".  Not the first one, but rather the remake with Tom Cruise.    OK, so if lightning awakes aliens underground and they attack, I might need to go fast.

But most of the time its more like Battlefield LA where people have time to go to the beach to watch the things hit, and news crews show up and are reporting live.  Well, if CNN is sending trucks to the shoreline and has time to broadcast, I figure I have time to get my trailer and gear and get my butt headed the opposite way.

To be honest, most crisis are just that because of inaction, rather then urgency.  I think about Hurricane Katrina and Sandy where people were given 24 to 48 hours notice so it was ridiculous to be stuck there by choice. Now if you don't have the means, thats a different story, but to just sit there like a friend of mine did in her cozy New York condo with everyone saying leave is crazy.  Then she ends up walking down the street dragging luggage that she just carried down 30 stories until she got to a part of town with power just to rent a hotel room.  Now I'm not saying hit the freeway at every thunderstorm, but if you have an established evac plan, and can organize your stuff, then when the siren goes off or the TV says you should go, you can be in the first wave out and avoid later panic.

I remember some years ago being at Disney World for a week during a wildfire outbreak in Florida.  While fires were no where near us, all the news reports showed where and their movements with great detail.  The fire plan and where the fire fighters were fighting them.  They even opened the toll roads for free to help people evacuate. They had a few reports of looters in the evacuated areas.  In its totality the situation was bad, but all very well organized and orchestrated, and the whole Disney / Universal area never missed a beat or a dollar.  Less then 30 miles away was chaos and where we were was paradise. Sometimes the line to safety is that close, but you have to move to cross it.

To me this is not a bug out, its and evacuation. There is time to find alternate routes if need be, there is time to pack and gather useful or valuable items.   It will probably be organized by the government with police or military direction given for the first few miles out of the city.

IMHO the key in a forced or directed evac is to already have food and gear in inventory, its even better if its pre-staged.  The more time saved, the better off you are.  What you do NOT want to do is be running to the store trying to buy stuff.   The guy locking his storm shutters is miles ahead of the guy running around looking for plywood to board up his windows.  What is needed is a plan.

Ok, so that was a long long intro to what I'm actually doing about my plan.  Well I put on my reality thinking cap and said what would I really REALLY do, need, and want, if a "Katrina" type evac situation happened where I live.   Ground rules first, I would have +24 hours notice, Its a mandatory evac, Its local (meaning if I get 60 miles away from home or inland, I'm safe), I need to stay gone for 7 to 14 days (longer just means more food at this point), I will have no outside assistance while gone (no FEMA camp), it will not be WROL but there will be minimal LEOs self-protection WITH repercussions for actions later, and I will come back home but it may sustain substantial environmental damage.  Now i'm running a realistic simulation in my head, but i am physically walking around the house checking my gear status, logistics, weight, and systematically thinking this through step by step.

Now admittedly, I know i'm way ahead of the game with my trailer pre packed with tents, lights, camp gear and stuff, but in doing a realistic dry run in my head the first thing I realized my food plan is all wrong.  I have 5 gallon buckets and shelves of can food, but none of it is organized in meals or labeled to insure a proper meal mix individually.  This is great for long term storage, and I can crack them and stay home quarantined and eat for months, but there is no way to carry all of it, nor should I even plan to.  If its a storm or wildfire or environmental, why try and lug 8 months of food when 1 is more then sufficient.


Then I realized my 2 totes with 5 cases of MREs and freeze-dried foods were stored way in back because I don't need to get to them ever, but they should be the FIRST totes into the truck. I have +2 weeks of food for my family of four ready to go in a instant, and I would have to move the whole damn pantry to get to it... NOT SMART.

Then I looked at how I have my important documents, All nice and neat in a safe that will still be bolted in place when I evac, or maybe i'll empty it.  WOW, how about making duplicate copies AND electronic copies and putting them and a flash drive in with the food right now.  And while i'm at it, take a lesson from the Walking Dead.  I always liked the part where Rick could tell his family left home alive because they took the family photos off the wall.  I can scan the family photos and put them on the drive and thus secure them too. Another free missed opportunity to be ready.

Another important thing I realized while camping with my wife and daughter is that they have different needs then my son and I.  He and I go all the time and take the same stuff with no problem.  We got it down to a science.  They went with us and the load out more then doubled. I figured just grab more food, but girls need things we guys don't...  WHO KNEW?  I know they have an "inventory" at home, I make sure of it. I guess i'll take a tote and have my wife pack a month or so worth of whatever mystical magical stuff they need in it and label it "girly stuff" and permanently add it to my gear.    I also realized how vitally important a camp toilet is for ladies now. We guys just run to the nearest tree line and cut loose. I have two words of advice about chem toilets... "get one".  It may seem like wasted space now, but if I had to evac the ladies in my household for a week without it. I might be better off facing the hurricane.

Oh and the little microfiber towels in the auto department are worth their weight in gold.  They air dry fast, are soft, rinse out quick, and are the perfect size for everything from cooking to camp bird-baths to whatever.  And while i'm at it I need more empty buckets then I thought.  dishes, baths, hot water seems to need to be everywhere.  AND I need a bigger pot to warm it in over a campfire.

As well as I had done in my base camp kitchen kit, I realized I don't have enough cups or plates or ANY sort of tableware. I simultaneously realized the ladies in my life don't like eating out of mess kits. My son and I were just chomping away at dinner happy as clams, only to look up and see my wife and daughter just holding their mess kits looking at the both of us like we were cavemen eating hog slop right out the troff.

I also discovered a trip to Toys-R-Us would be a good investment.  Sure if the S really HTF, there would be bigger things to address then fun, games, and entertainment, but if it were to evac because of an environmental situation, keeping "the troops" entertained and not thinking about the situation or just eating because of boredom is key.  Baseball gloves and ball, frisbee, lawn darts, horse shoes, whatever works to relax and clear our minds.

All in all, the conclusion I have come to is that SHTF I was prepared for survival, but there is some room for comfort in what I would consider a more typical evac situation.  Now most of the changes i'm now making are free.  Its logistical and organization, not spending or buying.  None of the changes effect the efficiency of my preparations in a shelter in place, nor do they change how i respond if I really did need to leave and take it all because i'm never coming home.  But my adjustments will build in the flexibility to respond to the much more likely temporary evacuation scenario.  I also realized I have a long way to go.