I've changed as the times have changed
I checked my car kit in December and I thought it was in good order. I replaced the MREs, candy, and water bottles, made sure everything was there that I thought I needed, and put it away. About five weeks later, I was at the GFs house and we decided to go for a hike with her family. I had no longjohns at her place, so I raided my car kit. What I discovered is that the heat of the summer had destroyed the elastic waistband in the longjohns. While they still served the purpose, it made me realize that my previous inspection was a little too cursury. I checked the wool socks in the kit and they were fine and they retained their elastic quality. Just something to think about.
My home kit is an entire room. I'm up there rotating food every time I go shopping and my BOBs get the once over about two to three times a year lately as I've upgraded to LED lighting and gone to better self-assembled MREs. I feel comfortable that I'm set with the kits I have there, but I'd like to put together a travel kit next.
If there's a large scale disaster where getting out of the country or to another hemisphere would give me the best chance of survival, it would be nice to have a kit that I could fly with that would pass DHS muster if I had to carry it on a plane. Trying to get one of my existing BOBs to that spec would take an hour or more and still be lacking valuable items that would be perfectly legal to fly with.
Lately I've been messing with my day hike kit almost constantly. I'm really trying to sort it down to the smallest it can be so I'll have it on my person rather than in a pack, but I don't like some of the compromises that come with that. As a result, my fear is that in sorting out what I want to carry on a given hike, I'll forget something vital and really screw myself over. Hopefully I'll settle on the right kit soon and then only have seasonal and weather adjustments to make at the time of the hike.
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