The reason I was gone was that we were ‘bugging out’. This is our first camping trip in several years. One of the reasons is that I drag my feet when it comes to camping is that my wife and I differ on how and what to do. She tends to only want to go to large parks with showers and such which drives me nuts. I have more solitude at home. Another reason is that, I really prefer a minimalist gear experience, but for the family is a day’s worth of prep on both sides to get all the stuff together.
Nevertheless, we went Monday through Thursday with some friends to a more primative and smaller campground in the middle of the week. It was mostly young families, pretty quiet. But let us get back to the subject at hand, bugging out.
Bugging out is a prepper term for leaving your primary residence on short notice. It would be the opposite of bugging in which is sheltering in place with minimal outside contact (kind of like what we have been doing since March). Depending on the length of the journey, you are ‘living off the land’ as you move to get to your final destination.
Why the heck would you bug out? Well some good reasons would be localized flooding for instance Hurricane Katrina or more likely in our case wildfires or you don’t want to be caught in the middle of a daily BLM riot. When the option to leave is better than the option to stay, you would bug out.
Now is a good interlude to inject some reality into the mall ninja line of thought. ‘I’ll just go into the back woods and take what I want. All I need is a rifle and knife.’ First, you are going to be competing with all the other idiots that think this way. Second, during the whole time, I saw nothing larger than a chipmunk so if you don’t have skill and knowledge of the area your chances of success are quite slim.
Camping is a good way to test your gear, skills and mettle. I have really tried to make my life easier by creating containers with dedicated gear so that it is an easier preparation to go. The problem is the stuff seems to grow more and more. Some of the stuff in the back of the photo we didn’t even use, like the generator (nor did we really need). It is kind of nice to have nearly a full kitchen without having to steal from the kitchen.
The way our cache has grown is over the years, if we needed something on the trip, we added it to stay with the camping gear. It is the little things that are probably the most helpful such as tin foil (for our hats), zip lock bags for leftovers and cooking utensils. Sometimes old cookware got rotated out the kitchen and into the the camping pile. We had an amount of basic spices that stay with the gear like onion, garlic, salt and pepper which is nice to not have to remember such things.
It can also be good to work on your improvising skills and not have everything you need. Cooking over a fire is a good example where often it is an exercise in doing with what you have on hand be it cooking surfaces or utensils. I cant say that we had everything we wanted on this trip. Had we been alone and not with another family, we would have done a few things differently but it worked out.
This year, it is particularly difficult. More people are ‘staycationing’ or staying close to home. I read that records are being set for boat sales this year, supporting that trend. The large parks always fill up fast and reservations usually need to be made in the spring time for summer weekends. But, I think that if you get off the beaten path a bit or are willing to travel a few hours, camping can be done on short notice.
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