WNTBTTA 7

WHAT NOT TO BRING TO THE APOCALYPSE 7

8) a bug-out vehicle is one of the most retarded survival tools out there.  Now, I’m not saying bugging out itself is a bad idea.  It isn’t a GREAT idea, but it is probably what most of us are going to be stuck with.  Just like having a mortgage on a retreat is worse than no retreat at all, needing a bug-out vehicle is just compounding a bad decision.  Bugging out is better than bugging in at suburbia, but it is still fraught with risk and danger.  To deal with that danger, you live as close to possible to a retreat as you can, both minimizing the size of the urban area you work and live in, and the distance away from the retreat.  It is far better to live in a small city and have a junk land retreat only a few miles away ( say, half a day’s bicycle ride-probably no more than 100 miles maximum ) than to live in a humongous urban super-city and have a groovy deluxe forty acre retreat with concrete fortress and babbling brook and pasture and woodlot and cows, but a thousand miles away.

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You should start your prepping journey by minimizing debt and minimizing the number of people surrounding you.  Don’t maximize that debt and crowding, THEN think at the last minute you can safely escape.  Because, YES, you will wait until the last minute.  The very thought of giving up your trophy wife and three financed cars ( two careers, two commuter cars, one bug-out vehicle ) and mortgaged McMansion and private schooled conehead spawn and mistress on the side, well, it just does not compute.  You won’t act at the first sign of trouble because you could lose all that.  So you leave when it is obvious the crap really honest injun truly has hit the fan.  Along with everyone else with the inclination.  And odds are good you will die, long before you reach your destination.  It is all well and good to assume your studly vehicle and your arsenal of semi-autos will save you, but the first thing they teach you as a grunt is how easy the ambusher has things and how screwed you are as the ambushee.  And roads are a channeling system into ambush.  It is as simple as that.  You think it is bad enough you will be killed?  You’d be lucky.  Once a half smart ambusher sees what you are carrying, you had better already be dead.  Because Tommy Tactical High Speed gear yells “survivalist” and if I were the guy I’d be torturing you into directing us to your retreat.  The longer the travel, the greater exponentially you face danger.  The shorter the distance, and the less road you are on, the less dangerous.  A bug-out vehicle like a bike is one thing, a motor vehicle another ( if you can quietly go off road, the distances needed to travel can be increased slightly, but always beware mechanical failures as per Murphy’s Law.  With a bike, a spare chain and tire and two tubes will most likely cover everything.  A motorized conveyance just screams at Murphy to screw you ).

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9) freeze dried foods have their place.  Not in your storage pantry, but in the aforementioned bug-out kit.  You can go MRE-less like we already discussed,  which can easily also replace freeze dried foods.  Top Ramen, jerky and Power Bars are not too expensive, and filling, but for a hard physical bug out, hiking or biking, I’d max out the jerky and add a fat like peanut butter.  Or, just go freeze-dried to minimize storage and weight.  This is a small purchase, for a one time specific event, so cost isn’t really an issue.  But factoring in accidents and improbable events, I’d triple your expected travel time and then double THAT in water and food.  If you have to bike a hundred miles, and that one day turns into a week because the last half became a walk, for whatever reason, you might be glad to have the low weight/high calories of freeze dried foods.  Past that, however, you are buying WAY too much luxury and convenience for WAY too high a price, for far less calories than you need. 

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Most folks bleat pitifully that they need freeze dried for their meat, and while I drop my slacks and moon any and all vegetarians, even those idiots born into cow worshiping religions or whatnot, because humans were meat eaters from Day One and only greedy pig humping despots running an agricultural empire who wanted to maximize peasants to plant and cannon fodder to fight would insist on the population NOT eating dead animals would say otherwise ( the guys not eating meat do ingest dairy for animal protein, and that is one exception to the Meat Please Diet, but most overcrowded areas deny most people most animal proteins, even dairy ), I also insist that for poor people, meat is a post-apocalypse luxury, at least during the initial die-off.  Once you have your five to ten years of grain calories, okay.  Time to Animal Up.  But not before then.  Most “experts” insist on freeze dried first, rather than last.  I’m saying, calories first and foremost, protein next.

And freeze dried is saying “a few nice meals prior to starvation” if it is the mainstay of your prep diet.  A second thought add-on, not a staple.

END

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