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Trippers are Preppers too.

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Seems to me if you're a tripper then you're pretty much a prepper too. Not with the doomsday type of thinking, we're not doomers; you can't trip in the frame of mind convinced that everything's gonna go sideways but we do have to be prepared for that. Negative thoughts undermine potentially positive results. Backcountry travel is hard enough without self doubt and soured expectations. Being both realists and optimists means we can prepare for both the good and the bad, lingering a little when the going gets good and dealing with whatever when the going gets bad. Prepared for anything, fair weather or foul.
I've been rooting through my gear and clothing to prepare for whatever whichever trips might hopefully still be in my future. The dehydrator is out and running. Meal planning. Rain gear selection. I scored a new rain jacket on the cheap. Time for a new favourite hat? Overall reassessment of what worked and what didn't. So far the biggest prep changes are to the meal plan, playing with vegetarian protein options and coming up with new and improved meal ideas. I love quinoa. These days it combines with steel cut oats, walnuts, strawberries, chia and flax seeds for my morning porridge. I'll try substituting wild and brown rices for the usual Basmati to go with the dehydrated salmon. Out with the carb heavy pasta and in with the quinoa; it goes well with the dehydrated spaghetti sauce. Can I improve on the first nights steak and potatoes? Hm. I'm also looking into freezer bag meal planning. One pot meal types that'll be easy done over a small fire or alcohol stove. My little Vargo alky has been getting a work out; thinking about getting a Trangia. Maybe a smaller twig stove? I'm thinking lighter fuller food barrel.
Although we're in self isolation these days my wife and I are both looking back at the good times and looking forward to more of them. Better prepare for it.

How about you? Are you a trip prepper too? Any new additions to your gear list or trip type direction?
 
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Seems to me if you're a tripper then you're pretty much a prepper too.

How about you? Are you a trip prepper too? Any new additions to your gear list or trip type direction?

I think all trippers are, by nature, better “preppers” than 95% of the population.

We lose electric here with some regularity. Most often brief blinks, enough to knock out every device or blinking 12 clock, at least once a week.

With a hurricane or tropical storm we sometimes lose power for days (rural overhead lines and lots of trees). We are on a well and have 5 gallon and 2.5 gallon car boys, 10L dromedary bags and buckets for toilet flushing/sponge bathing. heck, we have a giant plant watering water barrel at the downspout from the largest roofline, and several water filters if need be. And a stream at the bottom of the property. We should be self-sufficient on water.

And stoves and fuel (whitegas, canister, wood) in the plural. And left over camp foods and freeze dried; enough for a couple weeks without hard rationing.

I have added nothing to the gear list. I did, without knowing what was coming, order a Mt. House Breakfast bucket a couple months ago, with some clue about the possible future go a bit extra in my grocery cart on dry goods, cans and other non-perishables, now sealed in a blue barrel in case shelves became barren or we want to venture out to the grocery store less often.

House heat is mostly a wood stove, which will soon not be needed. We don’t have AC for the most part, so no untoward summer suffering there. Our biggest pre-storm prep, on a well, is potable water supply.

I have for some years saved all of the kitty litter buckets and pails. For too many years; many since foisted off on friends, or I would need to build additional shop storage. Those foisted friends have found them handy for a variety of uses.

The usual 35lb snap lid buckets of kitty litter are danged handy in their own right. I have a lot of stuff stored in those, including dust protected shop rags, bird seed mix, FIAC wax, and etc.

https://www.ruralking.com/purina-ti...MIiqKN_Je26AIVQ18NCh0jDgliEAQYBSABEgJOpvD_BwE

FWIW those 35 lb litter buckets come with two different style lids; one style “hinge” pivots ¾ open, the other style lifts flat off. Choose wisely for your repurpose. Either make great buckets with the lid popped off.

I didn’t plan this, but over the last year the missus has twice bought (pricier) kitty litter in giant plastic jugs, simply because it was lighter than those 35 lb buckets I buy.

https://www.petco.com/shop/en/petco...MIi_vewJS26AIVkZ-fCh2FMQq_EAQYAiABEgKA-fD_BwE

Washed and rinsed those are perfectly sized 2.5 gallon water containers, 6” x 8.5” x 12” tall, with a screw cap. At 6” wide they fit nicely weight centered behind the seat in our canoes.

If I needed a cheap, crushed when empty to make room disposable canoe tripping water container I’d consider those. Probably work filled with rice or dried beans.
 
I do try to plan ahead for a lot of stuff...like having lots of deck screws and 2x4s on hand for spur of the moment projects. I garden so my freezer is pretty much full. Living in the country means you cant just run to the store whenever you want something, yoiu need to plan the trip to multi task.

Brad, I looked at my gear area in the basement and it scared me away. Waaaaaay too much stuff and pretty scattered about. It is long overdue for thinning.

I actually like basmati for the ability to cook like minute rice...makes meals a lot simpler.
 
Well, we surely aren't preppers as most folks think of or use the term but I suppose we are some sort of preppers.

We have a large and quite full chest freezer (the largest home freezer made in 2017) and a 360 foot deep well so electricity is important to us. But we also have a large welder/generator capable of running the house and a high quality smaller portable generator to back that up so it would be days after losing power before I got too worried. As long as a gas station withing driving distance had gas and electricity to pump it every with every 5-6 days we'd be good for as long as it takes to get commercial power back. And if I filled the diesel fuel cans with gas I could stretch that to 10-11 days at a pop.

We also have two big pantry cabinets in the kitchen (one is huge for a cabinet) and a 6' wide pantry closet and all are pretty well stocked as a matter of habit. Although we are only six miles in one direction from a Food Lion and ten miles in the other direction from a cluster of three grocery stores with a Walmart among them we kind of still buy and stock up as if we still lived a lot further from grocery stores....and maybe like we still had kids feet under the dining room table every night.

And we dehydrate some foods, can others and have both the Foodsaver style vacuum sealer and a larger commercial style chamber sealer from our farm owning days. The canned stuff is primarily jams and jellies these days with occasional bread and butter pickles. Dehydrated foods are mostly precooked starches and fruit although we are expanding our dehydrating horizons as we go.

And as we package our own dehydrated and freeze dried meals we have a lot of bulk freeze dried stuff on hand. I buy meats in the #10 cans when the price is low and buy bulk fruits and vegetables, mostly from Northbay Trading. We have diced beef, turkey and chicken, ground beef, asparagus (the unicorn of freeze dried food), corn, peas, green beans, sweet potato, potato, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, cauliflower, broccoli, blackberries, spinach and mushrooms. Some of those we bought to try out and most are in steady rotation for tripping meals.

Open freeze dried stuff is sealed in canning jars using a Foodsaver jar vacuum sealer attachment to keep it fresh indefinitely.

A look in the basement trip food cabinets shows (in part)....

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And there's nine more unopened #10 cans in another cabinet.

We also have a wide variety of quick cook or no cook starches on hand.... Here's precooked and dehydrated pasta and brown rice

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This is a 4 minute cooking pasta off the grocery store shelf. Add boiling water, place in a bag or pot cozy to 8-10 minutes and it is ready to eat. There's precooked and dehydrated Basmati rice and some other cooked and dehydrated pasta in the background.

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An oriental grocery store is a treasure trove of quick and no cook starches. Mung bean noodles, real ramen, sweet potato starch noodles, somen, buckwheat noodles, rice noodles all add variety to tripping meals.

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We both bake (Nancy is known as "Betty Crocker" by the neighbors) and we bake a lot of what folks nowadays call "artisanal" bread. A quick look in the pantries shows all purpose, bread, pastry, whole wheat, rye, pumpernickel, semolina and two kinds of rice flours. We have a gas range and two electric wall ovens for good reason.....

Here's a couple loaves of an Italian semolina bread we make often. We use the same dough for pizza, pitas, flat-breads and rolls.

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A couple each of semolina and rye made at the Carolina gathering of the smokingmeatforums.com crowd's annual BBQ weekend in 2018. That annual gathering is in conjunction with the Carolina Brewmasters. It's a good time with good folks good eats and good beer.


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We cure and smoke our own meats and make our own fresh, cured and dried sausages. Here's a brisket of homemade pastrami.

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And one of the neighbors said "Can you teach me to make sausage". Silly girl....three hours and 70 pounds later.... Here's some of it; Italian, cheddar jalapeno kielbasa, brats and cheese brats. As requested most is cheddar jalapeno bratwurst.

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I'm pretty new to mushroom collecting and still keep a good guidebook handy. I'm seeing more mushrooms this spring every time I step into the woods or walk across a field. For some reason we get a lot of puffballs on our property and they'll be starting to come up in the next 3-4 weeks. Which suits us fine as they are Nancy's favorite. And now that I'm entering my third spring here in North Carolina I'm steadily learning about more and more of the edible and medicinal plants that we're surrounded with.

Lastly, I fish, hunt and sometimes trap. If push came to shove I could feed us on the fish and game here and I sure wouldn't hesitate to put an arrow or bullet into one of the many deer that pass through or around the perimeter of our yard every morning.

So, I guess that if all this makes us Preppers then I'll wear that title proudly...... Hmmm.....Maybe it's time to play Hank Williams Jr and "A Country Boy Can Survive"......

Best regards to all,


Lance
 
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Not really here. I don't tend to package meat or much freeze dried stuff aside from mixed veggies and mushrooms and corn. I do dehydrate ground turkey and pork and beef that is low fat
I just buy beans and stuff in the market Pasta etc before the trip as I have limited sealed storage and mice

However the store overflows with vegetables and the local butcher is sending increasing number of cattle to that special place and the local hens have ramped up output so there is no shortage of meat and veggies and eggs.

Pasta and tomato sauce on the other hand.. Not to be found. Wish I had grown or bought some bushels last year.
Nor any flour or sugar.
Nor coffee filters ( they are being used to make a barrier in home made face masks) ( we have a metal one so no issues there) We do have bread in the aisles..gaak. I would rather make my own and because I still had three lbs I did not hoard flour.
I don't have three pounds of flour anymore.

Timing is everything. With limited space hoarding anything is a problem.. not going to happen to buy a case of paper towel

TP and paper towels are not an issue. We don't have much but we are starting to use rags and dish towels for all purposes. The bin in the bathroom holds the special towels and bleach solution.

At the end the world may be more quiet and we have less needs.

Maybe we are preppers sorta. We lose electricity often and it averages in the winter a day a week.. Lost it on Tuesday after we had a foot of heavy wet snow. We have a well
We did the ultimate home improvement. A whole house generator. The only way I know we have had a power failure is that the Internet does not work.
Wish the propane could be piped to the house so I could have a gas range but the tank is 70 feet away from the house and ten feet from the genny. To pipe to the kitchen would be a massive undertaking involving 100 feet of blasting a trench in rock.
 
I have been a tripper for 60 years. Good skills to know when times get tough.
Preppers are a can of worms. I do not shoot an AK-47, I have no safe room, no 1,000 rounds and my military pack bug out bag does not weigh 75 pounds. They are mostly crazy people with a lot of fear, some military training and a lot of theories about TEOTWAWKI, etc. I avoid em like the virus.
 
ppine; don't forget their insane belief that a little .223 popgun will do anything against a tomahawk or predator from the other side of the country!
 
To Lance, interesting Hobart machine. Looks like some type of combo? Can you post some details?

Oops, sorry Dagger, I missed this....

It's a Hobart 84145 14" Bowl Chopper, AKA a "Buffalo Chopper".

https://www.bakedeco.com/detail.asp...J38DIG19j407kTymgrqXYA1sEyVbmPcxoCYfoQAvD_BwE

The bowl spins 22 times a minute while the blades run at 1725 RPM. It will make around 5 pounds of meat into hot dog consistency batter in less than a minute. Or make a bowl of cole slaw or salsa in just a few seconds. Mine has the optional #12 accessory hub for slicers, shredders or a grinder. It is a lot quieter and smoother running that my meat grinder so I usually pull it out for larger batches of sausage.

I also have its much larger big brother, a Hobart 18" chopper which makes up to 10 pounds at a time. I really don't need it anymore so I probably should sell that one as it would finance a couple of pretty nice canoes.

We used to have a farm in Upstate New York and I was an avid hunter (not so much with just two of us now) where we processed our own critters. And I processed some deer for friends and family. I learned to repair or rebuild meat slicers, bowl choppers and a few other kinds of food service items in order to flip some and pay for what I kept. In fact I still do that and have three high end Hobart slicers in various stages of repair or rebuilding in the basement right now.

I also learned to do the same kind of work on some industrial woodworking, metal working and welding equipment for the same reasons. I'd buy, repair and flip 2-3 of something to pay for the nice one I kept. That helped with marital harmony and was the only way I could afford late model industrial equipment.


This is making venison burger, hot dogs, Frankfurters and Coneys back at the farm....

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And more recent pictures here in North Carolina....


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And the business end. The blades sweep about 1/32" from the outer side of the bowl in a properly tuned and adjusted chopper and cut even very small particles very cleanly if the meat is cold. Here in North Carolina most Buffalo choppers seem to be used for chopping pork butt BBQ or for making slaw.


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All this sausage making stuff has me hungry. It's a nice day so I think I'll dig some sausage out to grill for dinner......

Best regards to all,


Lance
 
I do not shoot an AK-47, I have no safe room, no 1,000 rounds and my military pack bug out bag does not weigh 75 pounds.

No assault rifles here, not even any semi-autos. Don’t keep a “bug out bag”, but the barrels have stoves/fuel and some week’s worth of food kept stored. The big first aid kit and Spares/Repairs kits stay packed. Truck and van stay gassed up. I could grab tents and sleeping bags in 60 seconds and be out the door in minutes. On the whole I’d rather be here.

No AK’s, but a couple of shot guns, couple of revolvers, couple of small game guns. No “Safe room”; I feel pretty safe in the house down a long dirt drive.

The “1,000” rounds of ammunition? I dunno, I’d have to go count. Between various shot gun shells, including old lead shot, pistol rounds, .22’s. . . . . . . do the boxes of .22 Dust Shot count?

I am not a gun nut. Honestly. I haven’t fired a shot gun in 3 years, since I cleaned and tested the guns a late friend owned for his widow. Haven’t fired a pistol with anything larger than a .22 in a year.

But I am chagrined when I read some newspaper report of a police bust that found “A dozen firearms and 1,000 rounds of ammunition”.

It’s a good thing I am so well behaved.
 
Lance: All I got is my trusty Kitchen Aid meat grinder and a Lem sausage stuffer. I love that Hobart machine you got. I might have to start saving my lose change for one of those. :)

Mike: I couldn't agree more. I wish news would go back to the time when the words "news" and "show" meant two different things, and commentary was reserved for people that had done the the researched, or accumulated a lifetime of experience, so they could talk factually and with authority on a given subject. These days, media loves to talk. Mostly about stuff they don't understand. What they consider a large amount of "bullets", many would consider a nice afternoon with the family out plinking. I miss the days where a brick of 500 .22LR was $6.99 at WalyWorld or CVS.
 
I miss Walter Cronkite. I don’t watch news anymore. I get all mine by reading newspapers and articles on the internet.

I never was one to watch television news for entertainment, but it was perhaps a necessary approach by broadcasters to reach audiences and captivate them with "someone you can trust" rather than just another talking head. I agree that getting the news both good and bad from someone who was like a favourite uncle (or aunt) felt as much like a nightly social call than anything else. I do appreciate that. But nowadays I skim through the net for news, stopping briefly on some headlines, plunging headlong into others, but mostly sifting through for other articles mostly in the arts, home and garden, food, travel sections...
 
Lance: All I got is my trusty Kitchen Aid meat grinder and a Lem sausage stuffer. I love that Hobart machine you got. I might have to start saving my lose change for one of those. :)

Dagger, keep an eye out on whatever website(s) school districts auction their old food service equipment on. That's where I bought nearly all the Buffalo choppers and the big majority of the high end slicers etc I've flipped. I have found a few choppers on Craigslist too but they usually are asking more than I can buy them for and still make enough to be worth overhauling them. But sometimes not asking too much for a personal keeper if that makes sense. And have had no problem selling them on CL after refurbishing them and making a darn good profit.

There are four models of the Hobart 14" bowl chopper going back several decades. All are very good machines and all could mount a bowl chopper specific #12 accessory hub bolted on off to the side. Some of the parts for the first two models (8141/8142 without the accessory drive and 84141/84142 with the drive) are not available any more with the eccentric bronze hinge pins for adjusting the bowl lid's fit to the bowl rim being the critical one-unless you have access to a metalworking lathe and can turn the ends of a hunk of round bronze rod off center....

If one catches your eye shoot me your contact info by PM and I'll be glad to fill you in on what to look for, what to avoid and what to jump on like a bad rash....


Best regards and happy hunting,


Lance
 
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