Good stuff.
Only one thing to add. Replace the bag of flour with colored aquarium gravel, (green, brown, blue.) Animals and insects will eat the flour, wind will disperse it or rain will wash it away, but gravel will hang in there and small amounts are not likely to be noticed of you aren’t looking for it.
Ping.
To begin with - move the HE*L out of the city NOW. Then you’ll have a fighting chance of survival.
Play all the tied rags and piles of flour you want - if TSHTF, you are going to cross paths with others trying to get out too = others determined to survive - and that well might mean taking whatever YOU have.
Think of a big freighter going down - picture all the rats scurrying to escape...running over one another.
The city has ALWAYS been the place NOT to get caught in when the hammer comes down. It wont be just others trying to esacape and others looking to rob them, but the cities will go under immediate lock down and there will be curfews. Anyone caught skulking around after curfew is also the target of the law - or what will pass for law.
So if you DO manage to get out of the city - then what? Do you have friends where y ou are going? ARe you especting they should give y ou safe haven - and food? ARe you KNOWN where you are going? Strangers in small towns, villages, farm lands, are going to stick out like sore thumbs.
You will run out of food in 2-3 days. What then?
Better, maybe, to take all your prep time in getting out of the city BEFORE you think you need too - if things go bad in Nov., you may already be too late.
One other bit of advice from a guy who lives in the country - you’d be perfectly welcome to play these games on my land, but PLEASE let me know ahead of time! The further out of town you go the more likely you are to run into folks for whom Officer Friendly is a distant fiction and who pretty much have to take care of strangers snooping and pooping in the trees by themselves. The last thing in the world I want to do is ventilate some kid with high-tech viz gear and a paintball rifle who happens to scare hell out of me in the dark.
This is incredibly good advice. Kudos to Travis McGee.
We have been pursuing a little harmless nocturnal archeological project for the past 3 years. Thats fancy talk for digging holes. We know the woods around our neighborhood like the back of our hands. We can now walk it in total darkness. We do carry small green LED lights for the darkest nights but we only use them intermitently.
Walking around in the dark is great for your morale. For one thing you stop being afraid of the dark. Its very empowering. You also develop very good night vision.
Yes you can and will encounter other beings in the woods at night. We have had encounters of the close kind with deer, coyotes, a pesky skunk, a weasel, bobcat and one night a bear. The Bear was a little unerving but we smelled him coming and heard him moving around. He was as anxious to avoid us as we were him. I’ll admit we did high step it back home that night. We do carry pepper spray and a machete. We decided early on a gun was probably a poor idea for that location. We also do not sneak through our neighbor’s yards, well except for Mom. LOL!
Bottom line if we had to we could jump my Mom’s fence (she lives across the street and yes we keep a piece of carpet to facilitate getting over) and disappear down into the 100 year flood plain and be gone.
One of the most interesting challenges is when someone says “global village” is to ask them to walk across their county, North to South then East to West. Counties are HUGE. They are also full of opportunities if following Matt’s advice. A person can get a sense that no one, no outsider, could ever defeat them instead of having the all too common idea that they are so small, the world so big, and they have no chance.
To this I can only add one bit: Get a good PVS-14 and learn how to use it. That includes utilization of both helmet and weapons mounts. Bring spare batteries. Learn how to operate 100% passively. And once in a while switch the thing off in the middle of your training session, adapt, and complete the exercise.
Here in swamp country, I would also advise insect repellent, a good machete and a sidearm in case you run into some of the, er, 'bigger critters', particularly during water crossings.
For later reading.
For later. Thanks for posting and Matt, thanks for writing it.
Twice when I was in my teens, I tried to sneak up on someone during the night.
Once, I saw several cops looking at my car. I was doing nothing wrong but didn’t really want to announce my presence until I got closer to see what they were up to.
I had not gotten very far when one of them told me to come on out which I did. No problem, as they were suspicious of where the car was parked and I had a good answer.
Anyway, I grew up in the woods hunting (often at night) from the time I was about 5 and thought, wrongly it turned out, that I could slip up on anyone.
The lesson I learned it if someone is concealed in a good spot you will very likely see someone moving around in the woods before they see you.
Am always interested in new perspectives and am a big fan of EFAD. Lest y’all think however that despite my guns and survivalism (this what we called it back in the 80s) I take myself too seriously, I must confess, proudly, that I and my ninja-obsessed brother perfected variations on all of these techniques, and many more, sans night-vision gear but avec tabi-boots, snorkels, Cooey .22 rifles, “110” photographic equipment and home-made compound-bow launched incendiaries, in some of the most devastatingly, radically, totally insane all night panty raids a certain girls-camp ever saw.
Definitely stuff I should be doing. Also the recommendation down-thread of goggles to protect the eyes - don’t wanna skip that.
Much appreciated are grey man techniques. One illustration by Travis in (I think it was) the first book of his trilogy was Rayna carrying a green T-shirt until she needed to use it as a makeshift balaclava - making the point that one can make do with everyday objects rather than being tac’d up and worthy of note to TPTB.