Page 3 of 3 FirstFirst 123
Results 41 to 49 of 49

Thread: Have “bugging out” questions please help

  1. #41

    Default

    How fit are you? how old/fit are the kids? are you female? I suggest that you walk alongside of a bicycle with a small pack on your back. Kids over the age of 10 or so can carry small packs, with at least their sleeping gear a bit of food and water. Of course a whopping sized boy of 14 can carry a serious load, 30-40 lbs. Such a person can be on the other side of the bike, helping you push. The vietcong did this, thru swamps and jungles with 200+ lbs on the bicycle. If your trip will mostly be on pavement, consider having a small load in a cart behind the bicycle. Depending upon your strength and fitness, you can be pushing 100 lbs by yourself on the bike and you're likely to need every bit of that carrying capacity. if one or more of the kids has to be transported on it. Don't try to do anything in daylight, because you'll just get preyed-upon. Depending upon your strength and your area, you're likely to have to cut holes in woven wire fence, if you can't pull the bike up by a rope and lower it on the other side. Depending upon what you are fleeing, you might well be better off caching lots of food, buried in the crawlspace under your house, under the concrete of a shed someplace (busting the concrete and renewing it over your cache). I admire your spirit, but if you're an older female and the kids are small, it looks very, very bad for you if shtf. Perhaps a motorcycle, with a very quiet muffler and a trailer could be made to work. You need night vision in the worst way. The real deal starlight stuff is very expensive as in $2000. The $400 and less type does work, but anyone with a passive IR goggle will see your active IR beam like an airport beacon


  2. #42

    Default

    How fit are you? how old/fit are the kids? are you female? I suggest that you walk alongside of a bicycle with a small pack on your back. Kids over the age of 10 or so can carry small packs, with at least their sleeping gear a bit of food and water. Of course a whopping sized boy of 14 can carry a serious load, 30-40 lbs. Such a person can be on the other side of the bike, helping you push. The vietcong did this, thru swamps and jungles with 200+ lbs on the bicycle. If your trip will mostly be on pavement, consider having a small load in a cart behind the bicycle. Depending upon your strength and fitness, you can be pushing 100 lbs by yourself on the bike and you're likely to need every bit of that carrying capacity. if one or more of the kids has to be transported on it. Don't try to do anything in daylight, because you'll just get preyed-upon. Depending upon your strength and your area, you're likely to have to cut holes in woven wire fence, if you can't pull the bike up by a rope and lower it on the other side. Depending upon what you are fleeing, you might well be better off caching lots of food, buried in the crawlspace under your house, under the concrete of a shed someplace (busting the concrete and renewing it over your cache). I admire your spirit, but if you're an older female and the kids are small, it looks very, very bad for you if shtf. Perhaps a motorcycle, with a very quiet muffler and a trailer could be made to work. You need night vision in the worst way. The real deal starlight stuff is very expensive as in $2000. The $400 and less type does work, but anyone with a passive IR goggle will see your active IR beam like an airport beacon.

    You need to drink 1 gallon of water per day and a small kid needs half that much. You need to eat 2500 calories per day when holed-up and up to 4000 calories per day when working long, hard hours out in the cold, wind, dampness.The fish and game will be long gone 2 months after shtf. So the only reasonable source of food will have to be caches at your BOL. Get some buried there ASAP, in the form of grains, Koolaid, sugar, salt, powdered gatorade, supplements. You can add moslasses, since they "keep" for 10 years, but cache them separately from all other food, since they have a scent and really draw animals. All but 10 of the lower 48 states have bears and it takes a concrete bunker to keep bears out of a food cache. You can bury some fiberglass mesh, 4" deep, 6 ft wide, over a cache to discourage dogs, coons, coyotes from digging up your cache, revealing it to humans. I suggest that you walk past your caches once per month, looking for signs of digging. Caching, accessing caches, repair of damage, etc, has to be done at night, without showing a light or leaving any sign. It's a lot simpler to cache under the flooring of a structure, cause you can do that in daytime, as long as there's no windows or cracks that might let someone see what you're doing. A milsurp right angle bent flashlight, with a red lense, # of tape strips on the lense, kept pointed at the ground might suffice, especially in fog or snow. conditions.

    If you have no food (small kids need about half as much as an adult) then you lose about 1 lb of bodyweight per day, and the kids lose half that. Small kids can't spare much bodyweight at all. What you are facing is a nightmare, Above ground structures will all be searched, repeatedly, post shtf.
    Last edited by drane; 02-07-2022 at 06:40 PM.

  3. #43
    Senior Member Michael aka Mac's Avatar
    Join Date
    Feb 2022
    Location
    Queens, NY
    Posts
    213

    Default

    Considering how long ago this original thread was made, this is kind of a moot point, but hopefully others in the same situation, a grandparent with grandchildren, could benefit from this.

    With regard to bugging out for Seniors w/grandchildren. Abandoning your home to bugout is the last resort. Bugging out when you are a senior is no easy task and this difficulty is amplified when you have grandchildren by your side. You are probably in more danger bugging out with your grandchildren to some remote undisclosed location then you are staying at home, in a majority of SHTF situations (but not all).

    The times when it is 100% necessary to bugout is when the state calls for evacuations of your area. Natural disasters such like that in Hawaii where a volcano becomes active, areas that have been devastated by hurricanes or tornados that have left the area without power, water, or heat that would remain so for weeks or months, a reactor meltdown, etc..

    The fact is that being a senior, one with health issues in particular, and bugging out with your grandchildren, while having no survival skills and thinking you can survive in a remote location is wishful thinking. You are isolating yourself and your grandchildren from the community, medical facilites, resources and any possibly chance of help or rescue if something happens to you. Not to mention, if you yourself get injured; a broken ankle, head injury, heatstroke, or heart attack or stroke, you now have a situation where your grandchildren are alone in the wilderness, not knowing how to get out of the woods, and having no one know where you all are at. If something happens to you the end result is it will be a death sentence for your grandchildren.

    I remember when i was a kid learning to ride a dirt bike for the 1st time, I just had the training wheels taken off and thought it would be cool if i got a group of people to form a kids "bike gang" where we all could go ride bikes together. Fact is I was a greenhorn, too green to have anything useful to bring to the table. Wanting to form a community with like-minded preppers is a logical, worthwhile concept. But the question is: what knowledge or equipment, etc. do you have to bring to the table, or are you just like a kid wanting to form a bike gang 2 days after taking off his training wheels. It is most likely that anyone that you get to join you knows as much if not less then you do with regard to prepping and survival, as anyone knowledgeable would know that they would have to hold you by the hand and teach you the ropes from scratch.

    Here is when the situation is different. Now lets say that instead of bugging out to god knows where, that you have invested in a piece of land that is isolated with a water source and some sort of shelter. You have indoor and outdoor vegetable gardens, solar panels, a generator, car batteries and a dc-ac converter. In this situation, getting other preppers to bugout with you is far more likely, even if you are inexperienced due to what you now have to offer and contribute. Other then food issues ( food scarcity) one's chances of survival increases with the more people assisting, think safety in numbers. More people collecting water, firewood, and people sharing the camp needs such as hunting and food gathering. Another example is bugging out to a disaster shelter, hotel/motel, family or friends place. Having resources at your fingertips for someone in your situation is a better option. You should see some of the guys that run this website: active or ex military, healthy, strong, knowledgeable, and prepared. Manny of them have been specifically trained for all these disaster scenarios. If you are someone like the original post of this thread is, realize that a good majority of the members here have lived & breathed and trained in survival for many many years. What they are able to do and what you are going to be able to do will vastly differ. Yes by all means get yourself as best prepared as possible, stock up on long term storage food, water, have a stocked medicine cabinet, but when it comes to bugging out and ruffing it in the middle of nowhere, rethink your options and look for more viable solutions and emergency and disaster shelters. One of the major end game aspects of survival is getting rescued.

    I do like the original post's idea to have an indoor garden to supplement his food supply. I took horticulture classes and just love to grow my own food. But to supplement your food supply, you will need a very large space and have multi levels of veggie gardens stacked in rows to be of any benefit. Personally, I prefer doing this with hydroponic gardens, but that is just my personal choice. You can buy everything that you would need at a hydroponic shop, or online like places like Aerogarden.com. A simple DIY version entails a plastic shoe storage box, a fish tank aerator, and a grow light, and a medium to put the seeds, like peat moss or a hypogenic sponge.

    With regard to what conditions need to have happen in order for you to know when to bugout: You hear the Emergency Broadcast station sound the alarm to evacuate. You hear the nuclear power plant warning sirens go off. The roof and a majority of your home has been replaced by a fallen tree. Your area has been hit by a tornado that has destroyed the homes, supermarkets, downed electrical lines ... My point is the time to bugout should be obvious. Most of the time one does not get advance warnings, the SHTF and it's time to bug out.

    I have lived through earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, floods, fires, riots, blackouts, blizzards, and I have yet had the necessity to bugout. On the other hand, all of those natural disasters I had to hunker down. But then again, I was lucky, and it was only luck that SHTF wasn't bad enough to evacuate.

    Before the SHTF is when you should start to prepare. Research all of the state evacuation info that you can get your hands onto. Make several alternate routes to the same destination incase of wall to wall traffic or blocked roads and highways, and bring all of your medications, IDs, cash and jewelry that can be used to sell/barter along with as much food and water as you can carry. If not driving, a bike with a wheel barrel or trailer hookup would be ideal to lug your basic necessities. Infor someone of your possible routes and destinations so if you do not arrive there someone knows where to begin looking for you

  4. #44
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Jun 2017
    Location
    Victoria, Texas
    Posts
    1,996

    Default

    If I've got to bug out on a bike dragging a wheel "barrel", well, I'm just not going.

    Alan

  5. #45
    Senior Member Michael aka Mac's Avatar
    Join Date
    Feb 2022
    Location
    Queens, NY
    Posts
    213

    Default

    Alan, that was pretty much my suggestion in the 1st place for a senior citizen with 2 grandchildren. No car, no survival skills, bad health, an accident waiting to happen resulting in leaving 2 children alone in the wilderness.

    Probably a slightly better suggestion then telling a senior citizen to eat 4000 calories a day if doing a lot of work in the cold then drinking over a gallon a day.

    For the record most foreign refuges left when the SHTF pushing wagons ,carts, or on bikes and on foot. Not to mention if it was worse case scenario SHTF, ur not going to be finding gasoline anywhere anyhow

  6. #46
    Administrator Rick's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2007
    Location
    Central Indiana
    Posts
    58,832

    Default

    Can I hitchhike? Alan, you can push me on the bike. Old guys need to have advance notice of SHTF. We need to know it's gonna happen next Thursday at 2pm. Then we can check to see if we have any doctor's appointments, bible studies, shopping, etc. planned. If we do then the SHTF will just have to be postponed to a more convenient time. We are not bugging unless we choose to bug out. Will they have coffee, bacon sammiches or spam where we bug out too? If not, we ain't going. It's not rocket science.

  7. #47
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Jun 2017
    Location
    Victoria, Texas
    Posts
    1,996

    Default

    Ok Rick, I'll get one of those big baskets for the handlebars and you can ride in that. But, we can only go downhill. If we have to go uphill the deal's off...

    Coffee? Bacon? The only good reason for bugging out without coffee and bacon is to bug to someplace that HAS coffee and bacon...

    One thing about SHTF scenarios, is that you gotta work and plan to be on the backside of the fan. Of course that's where the S is but it's really kinda stable on that side. And when it starts hitting the fan everyone is going to be preoccupied so you can just pick up all the coffee and bacon you can carry and quietly slip away upwind and relax On The Beach...

    Alan

  8. #48
    Administrator Rick's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2007
    Location
    Central Indiana
    Posts
    58,832

    Default

    Your point is a good one. Bein' on the front side of the fan when the S hits would tend to be a tad messy not to mention smelly. Best we stay on the back side. I'll bring a pillow for the basket and my glasses. That way I can be the very first to let you know if we're about to hit something immovable not to mention potentially painful. I would give you hand signals about which way to turn but I fear I will be too busy hanging on.

  9. #49
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Jun 2017
    Location
    Victoria, Texas
    Posts
    1,996

    Default

    Like I said, Downhill only. No need for hand signals, unless it the sign of the Cross... If I see you do that I'll know to brace for impact...Why do you think I put you in front? I know how to survive, a country boy can survive...

    Alan

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •