The most useful and valuable resource any revolutionary movement can have is…what? Operational bases located in other countries. The FLN had Tunisia, the Viet Cong had Cambodia and to a lesser degree China, Anti-Castro forces have/had Florida, etc, etc. The advantages are, to me, obvious. Remember when you were a kid and played tag? If you were on ‘base’ you were immune from getting tagged. Same thing.
I mention it because I think one of the biggest advantages that a person can have in terms of personal preparedness is a secondary location to relocate to. Take the case of Katrina victims, for example. Lets say they do get on a bus or get some gas for their Buick and get out of Dodge. Where to go? If you dont have a secondary location or some good friends or relatives to set up with youre going to be living in your car or a hotel and neither one of those is an attractive option. The solution would be to have a place to go where you know that even if the accomodations arent exactly the same as the place youre evacuating from you at least know theres food, fuel, water, clean clothes and power waiting for you.
Realistically, this is probably the most expensive aspect of preparedness (short of fortifying or building-to-suit your primary residence). There are a few ways to go about setting up a secondary location. Your secondary location could simply be good friends or relatives. Showing up on their doorstep with just the clothes on your back would be a bit of a burden so if they are, as we say, ‘Like Minded Individuals’, they might not mind you leaving a couple footlockers in their basement in case you ever wind up becoming their guests for a few months. Clothes, bedding, toiletries, some food, etc…the usual stuff, goes a long way towards making oneself welcome. A decent all-season tent would be nice because then you could just pitch it in their backyard and really be a low-profile guest. Shower in the morning using their bathroom, run an extension cord out to the tent for a small heater or radio, and you’d pretty much be invisible to them.
Another option, and one I’d like to pursue, is to simply have the land available to retreat to. Realistically, we all want a nice fortified, spacious dwelling to pull up to as the mushroom clouds bloom in the distance. In reality, thats a pretty big-ticket item. The old addage about a bird in the hand being worth two in the bush really comes to play here. Example: the property you want with nice old stone farmhouse, year-round spring and fertile fields is $300k. While youre saving that money The Big Event happens and you need to relocate…but you havent gotten the property yet. A more realistic alternative, in my opinion, is to buy the bare land first and hold onto it until such time as you can build on it or re-sell it when youve saved enough for another place. This way, while your saving up for that perfect bunker you still have a place to go if you need to. A few acres of land that is in your name gives you alot more relocation options than a real estate brochure and money in a savings account. Its a place to park a trailer, set up a tent, drop a cargo container, or even build a small, basic build-it-yourself-in-a-weekend cabin.
While your sticking money away for the Perfect Place, you have this chunk of land as a fallback position. When you finally do have enough money you can either build on your proerty or buy the property you’ve been wanting all along and sell your other one (which probably appreciated in the interval).
At least, thats the theory….
Well, we can dream can’t we?
another option for some may be some isolated national forrest land. if you know of some that is rarely used you can scout out a place ahead of time so even if you dont have your own property yet you still have some quiet space you can sneak away to. make sure you keep a 4×4 pickup with a cap on it stocked and you could be good to go very quickly.
could
try relocating to the moon or mars. realistically wait after the event and occupy abounded lands of choice. there will always be problems with new sites, be it before or after an event, so do your homework before moving to that next site.
case in point, a friend offered a dream site took land and water samples and found a toxic brew of contamination. he turned in his dear aunt whom collected a fee from companies to dump there. his relatives are still pissed at him.
buyer beware, its your money and life. Wildflower 06
Knowing my luck, if I ever could build my money-no-object ‘dream-retreat’, it would probably show up on [Chinese/Russian/etc.] spy satellites, be mistaken for a secret military installation and be targeted with a nuke =/
Real-life application
I have given this a great deal of thought after I was forced to bug out during the Hurricane Rita event. It didn’t get nearly the run in the media that Katrina did, but was every bit as much of a CF as was New Orleans. Trying to evacuate the city and surrounding areas of Houston turned into a nightmare of traffic jams, fuel shortages and 200 square miles of gridlock with no water, food or fuel for 12 million people.
I avoided all that by leaving 12 hours before the mayor started making pronouncements, and I had prearranged plans with a friend who lives 40 miles NW of downtown. We did almost exactly as the Commander has suggested, I threw the storage boxes into my Expedition, grabbed our BoB’s and the rifles and unassed the greater metropolitan area. We brought our own food, water, ammo and sleeping arrangements with us and tried our best not to impact our friends. As it turned out, they had slacked in their own preparations so when the lights went out as Rita hit, the supplies we brought made everyone comfortable.
The only thing I had missed was extra fuel, and I have taken care of some of that since –metal gas cans are wicked expensive– but we have enough to clear out in advance of any more hurricanes.
I need to move.
Crom
Thoughts on this.
Good places are easier to find and cheaper than one might imagine. You just have to do some looking.
The place we have right now is an old farmhouse on a little over an acre. The original owners passed away, and left it to the grandkids who made it a rental property and got tired of managing/maintaining it. It needed work after years of abuse by renters, and since they couldn’t all agree on what do do with it decided to get rid of it.
Turns out the origninal owners were into wine making, and imagine my surprise when I discovered the grape vines and black cherry tree that had “gone wild” on the property, and the perponderance of rasberries and blackberries on the property.
When my grandparents retired, they found three acres in the Central Leatherstocking Region of New York that had a well-used (but still structurally sound) one room A-Frame cabin on it. The area had not been “discovered” yet, and the economy was (and still is) undergoing a recession due to lack of jobs in the region. A little DIY carpentry, and the place was livable and affordable on a pension and social (in)security. That location was almost a bug-out destination for yours truly when Hurricane Bob came up this way in 1991.