Four Problems and their Three Solutions When Bugging Out : Part 1 The Problems

Perhaps a broken window that lets in wildlife and weather, six months of unattended decay, and your retreat might end up being like this when you arrive. So you finally find yourself confronted with the need to bug out to your retreat. The good news is at least you have a bug out location, and youve practiced and prepared for the eventuality of having to bug out, unlike most of your neighbors and friends.

You load up your vehicle with everything you need to safely and successfully travel to your retreat, feeling confident and relaxed about having prepared prudently, and set forth. Because youve planned and even practiced this before, youve nothing to worry about, right?

Wrong!

In this two-part article series we first look at the problems inevitably associated with bugging out, and then in the second part, consider how to address and solve these problems.

Part One The Four Problems

It is true that youre in a better position and have a better prospective future than your un-prepared friends, but your future is far from guaranteed. Until you get to your retreat, you are as vulnerable as anyone/everyone else perhaps even more so as you are limited to only what you have in your vehicle something that offers very little security or resource. You are now confronting a terrible number of unknowns and variables and risks where anything from random bad luck to more serious things may interfere with your journey to your retreat, your future plans and your future life.

Lets look at four sets of risks that may interfere with your optimistic expectations.

1. Getting There Safely

This is probably a risk youve thought about already, but just because youve thought about it, that doesnt mean you can protect against it.

Clearly you need to bug out as early as possible, before the rule of law has totally collapsed, before the roads get jampacked full of other evacuees from your city, and before modern-day highwaymen start preying on travelers.

Maybe you are successful at doing this, and manage to beat the rush out of your city, but what happens if you have to travel through other cities on the way to your retreat? It is one thing to beat everyone out of your city by (say) four hours, but if you need to pass through another city that is four hours driving from the start of your travels, youll have no headstart at all on the outflows of desperate people from the second city. Maybe you beat the rush by a day, but have a two-day drive to your retreat youll be no better off than anyone else on the second day of your travels.

How far is it from where you live to your retreat? Each mile that you must travel is 1760 yards of potential for a puncture, a radiator hose bursting, or any other sort of unexpected problem with your vehicle. Each mile that you travel is 5280 feet of risk from any type of unexpected third party event not just evil people doing evil things to you, but innocent acts of bad luck such as a traffic accident, perhaps.

Maybe you dont get involved in an accident yourself, but maybe a semi some miles ahead of you on the freeway has jackknifed and is blocking the freeway, with traffic backed up for miles, and with hours of delay. Meanwhile youre burning through your precious gas to keep the car warm (or cool) and youre at risk of anything and everything in a stationary vehicle.

Talking about weather, do you have any seasonal issues to be concerned about? Have forest fires ever closed the roads in the summer? What about snow in the winter? Remember that you dont just need the highways to be ploughed and drivable, you need the last few miles of dirt road to your retreat to be passable too. How will you handle that, if it is an issue?

If youre in a vehicle visibly loaded with supplies (or, even worse and more conspicuously, towing a trailer), and if word has got out about whatever disaster it is youre fleeing, youve become a tempting tasty target for evil-doers all the way along your route, havent you. Our feeling is that you need to be in an ordinary vehicle with no visible amount of extra supplies in it.

It isnt just evil-doers you need to worry about. It is do-gooders too. Maybe the states governor has declared martial law and requires all people and vehicles to be off the road during hours of darkness. So instead of driving all day and all night to your retreat, you suddenly find yourself needing to pull over and anxiously/uncomfortably wait until the morning before you can continue your travels.

Sure, we know that you drive many thousands of miles a year normally, and never have any sorts of problems at all. But this isnt normal. This is anything but normal, and with Murphys Law waiting to trap you every possible way, the simple act of getting to your retreat will be fraught with risk.

2. Will Your Retreat be Secure

Okay, well say that you managed the drive to your retreat safely and successfully. Congratulations. driving up the driveway, and round the corner, theres your retreat, ready and waiting to welcome you. And now youre

You hope.

What say someone else has decided to make your retreat into their retreat? What say you arrive to find it already occupied by people who could care less that you say it belongs to you. Theyve got the retreat, and theyve got guns and are willing to use them if you dont leave and abandon your claims to their retreat. Or maybe you find your retreat looted, burned out, vandalized, abandoned, and unlivable. All your precious preps have disappeared.

Now, please dont tell us proudly about your op-sec and how no-one knows about your retreat. Thats sadly not true, no matter what you might think and hope. We discuss the impossibility and the ill-advisedness of trying to keep your retreat secret in our two articles, Is It Realistic to Expect Your Retreat Will Not Be Found and The Ugly Flip-sides of Opsec. Heres an alarming thought. Maybe you hire a local person to protect your retreat, and to visit it once or twice a week to make sure it is safe and secure. But how do you know that he wont then turn around and make your retreat into his retreat when things go bad?

3. Will Your Retreat be Functional

Lets hope for the best, and assume you not only safely made it to your retreat, but that the retreat is still standing, secure, and unoccupied. Great. But your problems are not yet over.

You unlock the main door and go in to the house. You are immediately overwhelmed with the smell of rat urine and feces. You go to your store rooms and find that youve a happy thriving colony of rats, enjoying your supplies, with little or nothing left for you to now survive on.

Or maybe you discover that a pipe burst in the last freeze, and youve got water damage throughout the house.

Or maybe some tiles blew off the roof and youve had rain and other things coming in through the roof.

Maybe all those things work fine, but you go to flush the toilet and you discover it is blocked. You dont know it, but some time over the last year, a trees roots broke through the pipe to your septic tank, blocking the flow of water and, ahem, other stuff, and youre going to have to somehow troubleshoot your problem and fix it.

Maybe you discover that your fuel tanks have rusted through and all your fuel has seeped away, leaving you with empty tanks and polluted ground.

Maybe everything works well, but after a week or two, you discover that theres a design problem with your heating system, and it keeps giving problems and eventually becomes totally broken. Or perhaps bad wiring burns out/shorts out your battery system. Maybe infant mortality (the propensity for electronic devices to sometimes fail early in their life) strikes and destroys your charging system or some other essential element of your retreat.

Maybe it is a more low tech problem. Your well proves not to be capable of sustained supply of water sure, it tested fine for a 15 minute test, but now youre using it, day in and day out, it runs dry. Or the reality of the power your solar cells can provide proves to be massively less than the theoretical amount they should have delivered. You can probably think of many more vulnerabilities.

There are countless things that can go wrong with a property, both while it is occupied and also while it is unoccupied. Unless youve been using the retreat on a regular and sustained basis, you have no way of knowing if the reality of its practical ability to support you will be the same as its theoretical promises. Youve no way of knowing if the equipment and services youve built into it will prove to be reliable low-maintenance and sufficient for your needs indeed, you dont even know for sure what your actual needs may be.

4. No Ongoing Farming Activity or Experience

Okay, now lets assume that none of these preceding three potential problem areas are giving you any grief. Lucky you! So lets now look at the fourth potential issue.

Depending on when you arrive at your retreat, sooner or later youre going to need to switch from eating from stored food supplies to growing your own future food needs. And when you do this, if you are doing it for the first time, youve a huge new Pandoras Box of unknown uncertain issues to confront and resolve.

Sure, youve got books galore on how to grow your own food, but have you actually ever done it, for real, before? More to the point, have you done it for several seasons in a row at your actual retreat location? The answer to this question is almost certainly no.

So now for the first time you find yourself grappling with who knows how many problems and issues. Insects and other infestations and wildlife might attack/destroy/kill/eat all your harvest. The soil might be lacking in some sort of nutrient or it might have too much of another type of chemical in it do you know how to understand and correct that?

You might do a great job of planting and caring for the crops, but when it comes to harvesting, you might discover that you lack the manpower to harvest the food before it spoils. Sure, you grew a perfect crop, but you only managed to harvest a quarter of it.

You might discover that one part of your property has the wrong type of soil and another part has too much water (or too little water). Another part might have too little sun. And protecting your crops from wildlife and diseases will be a full-time job. All the deer you were so enchanted to see when you first bought the property what do you think they eat? Yes, your food!

Farming is something that requires more than book learning. It requires skill and experience both in general terms and also in the specific issues and challenges posed by your particular property. It is more than likely that your first few years of cropping will be full of challenges and disappointments.

If you are raising animals, that too is far from a guaranteed cant lose scenario. Where do the animals come from to start with? Who will care for their health? Where will their feed come from? Who will slaughter/butcher them? Where will the meat be stored?

None of these issues are impossible to resolve, but they all assume a great supply of experience and know-how.

Read About Solutions in Part Two

If youve read this far, you now understand that bugging out is not as easy as it sounds, and, perhaps more importantly, moving into an empty unused retreat and relying on it instantly becoming the resource you hope it to be is something fraught with many uncertainties and possible problems. The good news is that these problems are not impossible to solve. Please now click on to the second part of this article The Three Solutions to the Four Problems of Bugging Out.

Four Problems and their Three Solutions When Bugging Out : Part 2 The Solutions

It is vastly preferable not to have to start farming your land from scratch after a disaster. Better to have the farm already operating as a going concern. This is the second part of a two-part article about issues to do with viably bugging out and transitioning to ongoing life in your retreat. If you arrived here direct from a search engine or other website link, you might choose to first read the first part which sets out the four main problems associated with bugging out, and then return back here to read about the three solutions we propose.

Solving the Four Problems of Bugging Out

In the first part of this article, we explained the four main categories of problems with the typical concept of maintaining a bug-out retreat and moving there in a crisis :

It may be difficult to get to when you actually need to bug-out The retreat or may not be available and in good condition when you get there The retreat may quickly prove to have problems and limitations once you start to live there The reality of starting to provide your own food may turn out to be much more difficult than youd hoped for

There are solutions to all these problems, please now read on.

Solution 1 Bugging Out Very Early

In its ultimate form this solution might seem extreme, and it might be massively life changing, but it is also the ideal answer. Move to your retreat now and live there permanently. That way, when if TSHTF, you are already in place, with a known quantity as your retreat, with all systems tested and functioning. The only major impact will be you switch from enjoying the

convenience of electricity from the national grid and local utility company, and you can no longer order in supplies of liquid/gaseous fuels as and when you need it. Oh, and the local country store can no longer be counted on to have much of anything for sale, either.

But at least you are already in place, already set up, and your lifestyle changes are minor rather than major.

You might perceive it impossible to turn your back on your high paying jobs, your city lifestyle, and everything else. That might be true (in which case, keep reading, for our second best solution), but maybe you should also revisit some of your assumptions about what you need and must have.

For example, you can live much more inexpensively in the country than in the city, and things which you formerly perceived as essential and necessary ($100+ meals several times a week when eating out, tickets to expensive shows, expensive business clothing, etc) can be replaced with much less expensive but still pleasant alternates (alternating between having friends for dinner and going to their place for a meal, or treating yourself to a meal at the local diner where dinner for two costs $20, enjoying the less sophisticated but more sincere amateur and high school productions, plays, musicals, and wearing comfortable unassuming clothing rather than name brand fashions).

Instead of needing to pay for both your residence in the city and your retreat, you now only need to pay for your retreat, which probably costs less than your in-city residence. And maybe instead of an impressive 4,000+ sq ft mansion, you realize that for your family of four, you can live perfectly comfortably and conveniently in a still spacious 2,000 sq ft residence. You no longer need to choose a property as much to impress and as a visible statement of your success and affluence, instead, you can now choose a property for functionality, convenience, and appropriateness. Instead of making payments on (eg) a million dollar home on a one-eighth of an acre lot, youll own, outright, (eg) a half million dollar home on a five acre lot. Oh, youll also be saving money on property taxes and insurance, too.

Instead of buying or leasing a new premium brand vehicle every year or two, you buy an old junker (that in truth is neither old nor junk) and keep it for ten years. It has fewer electronics, but is much more reliable because of that, and both easier and cheaper to repair when it does give trouble. A more modest older car can save you the better part of $1,000 a month right from the get go.

And instead of working a 50 hour week, plus another ten hours on commuting, you now have 60 hours free to farm your property or work in a local business/store in the nearby town. Maybe you can even take advantage of tele-commuting and still do some of your previous work, but remotely from your retreat rather than in person in the office.

Instead of spending hundreds of dollars a month on a health club, and tens of hours doing artificial exercise in a gym, you instead spend time working in the fields, simultaneously getting exercise and instead of spending money, earning money and growing food.

When you actually start to pick apart the elements of your modern lifestyle and convert them to an alternate lifestyle, you might be astonished at how it proves possible to turn your back on many of the seductive traps of modern-day consumerism and end up with a truly relaxing, healthy, enjoyable lifestyle in the country.

Wed also suggest you consider not just the concept of moving to a solitary retreat where you live on your own. Moving to become part of a prepping-focused self-sufficient community means youre part of a group of like-minded people, with similar values and objectives. Youll quickly fit in with such people, and be able to benefit from the synergy that comes from being part of a larger community. Our Code Green Communityrepresents one such approach to this, but there are of course others too. We discuss this concept from a slightly different perspective in an earlier article we published, Bugging Out Very Early a Lifestyle Choice. It is for sure a massive change in lifestyle, but one we urge you to consider.

Solution 2 A Fulltime Retreat/Farm Manager

The second solution is an interesting one to consider. You should contract with someone to farm your retreat property, and to maintain its grounds and the security of your dwelling. Maybe they even live on the property themselves (in a separate building). This would be a farm manager type person.

If your retreat is going to be adequate to support you and your family and anyone else who would join you, then it should also be adequate, in normal times, to be farmed on a commercial basis such that the income from its farming activities is at least enough to pay the farm managers salary, and maybe even leaving you with some extra cash generated too to cover the costs of owning your retreat. Maybe the income generated by actively working your retreat property will allow you to afford a larger, more productive and therefore more viable and life-sustaining property right from the get-go.

This means that if/when you need to evacuate to your retreat, you arrive at a self-supporting farm that is already in operation as a going concern, and even complete with skilled staff on-site. Sure, youll need to adjust its operation it will no longer be able to benefit from mechanized agriculture, but it is better to downsize an ongoing farm than to need to start one from scratch.

You and your farm manager will already know the most productive patches of land, what grows best and where, and how to succeed in spite of animals, disease, and other natural challenges.

This is of course also a feature of our Code Green Community you can have your lands farmed in absence, and your dwelling reasonably secured and policed, but it is also something you could realistically arrange for your own stand alone retreat property too.

The only thing to be slightly aware of is the possible danger that your farm manager comes to view your farm as his farm, and when you arrive to settle there, he may feel unwilling to relinquish control of it. Youll need to pick your manager carefully and be sure to positively assert and demonstrate your ownership/management/leadership at all times prior to arriving so as to ensure such problems dont arise.

Solution 3 Moving to an Added Value Retreat Community

Maybe neither of these first two approaches are feasible. There are some people, in some situations, where that is unavoidably the case. That is unfortunate, but it is no reason to despair.

Instead, you can consider added value retreat communities, where youd be joining a community of like-minded people, with some of the community already living in place, thereby providing security for your retreat facility, and making it easier for you to join a going concern rather than starting everything, on your own, from scratch once you evacuate to your retreat. Maybe you dont even wish to live an agrarian lifestyle, working on a farm in the fields. Maybe you wish to provide some type of services or do something else within a community anything from being a storekeeper to a restaurant owner to a doctor or other professional service provider. While we all focus first and foremost on the most essential things shelter, water, and food the reality is that an optimized life in a Level 2 or 3 situation will require a lot more than just growing food and eating it. Our Code Green Community would be one such solution, others may also exist, or you might create your own with a group of friends.

Not Solved The Physical Act of Bugging Out

The preceding three solutions have been focused on ensuring you have a viable sustainable living situation after having transitioned/bugged out.

But if you are choosing to remain in place until a time when you need to bug out in response to an emergency situation, you still need to focus very clearly on the most certain and secure way to travel to your retreat in a crisis.

You need to be able to go to your retreat well in advance of problems growing to a point of social collapse, and/or you need to be able to quickly get to your retreat securely when problems become unmistakably and unavoidably present. The latter

solution seems to revolve around non-traditional means of transportation either the extra flexibility of motorcycles or the freedom from infrastructure that an airplane provides.

We discuss these issues more in our section on bugging out.

Summary
By obvious definition and implication, when a crisis occurs, WTSHTF, it is then too late to discover weaknesses, shortcomings, problems, and overlooked forgotten essentials that are present in our retreat. We need to have all these matters addressed and resolved well prior to any situation that tests their efficacy in ultimate measure.

In the first part of this article, we looked at some of the types of problems you might expect to encounter when activating your bug-out plan and hunkering down to survive a crisis. In this second part, we suggest some solutions to minimize the possibility of such problems arising and interfering with your ability to safely and securely survive. Wed wish you good luck, but luck should have nothing to do with your chance of succeeding in an adverse future. You need to be well planned and well prepared.