Alternative Bugout Locations: The Roads Less Traveled

Preppers know they need to be prepared to both bug out and bug in, but many need to plan to have multiple bugout locations prepared to head to.

Below is a Red Cross emergency shelter. Don’t let this be you.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate Red Cross shelters like this one … it’s that I think it’s very easy to share germs in such places.

At Least Three Bugout Locations? Yes, but where?

Finding at least three locations can be a lot of fun if you enjoy traveling and trying new things. If you are a hermit, then it won’t be nearly as much fun.

Spice and I spent a LOT of time looking for a property that we could use as our main rural bugout location (BOL).  I’ll tell you more about that in a bit.

We simultaneously “made a deal” with Mammy, my sister, for a secondary bugout location… since we live about 100 miles apart (far enough for a localized problem not to get us both, but manageable), Both of us are preppers and both have plenty of stores for most reasonable sized SHTF situations… so we have “we go there, you come here”.

We’ve also collected ideas of places we can go if we need a “big bugout”, something to get entirely out of the region… and we’ve stockpiled the necessary supplies to get us there without having to stop along the way.

I’ll expand upon each of these things below, but let’s get one thing out of the way right now.

First Step? Where NOT to bugout to

There are a whole bunch of places that I don’t want to be if the Stuff Hits The Fan (SHTF). 

I gotta be honest, I am a country boy, and I just have zero desire to be stuck in a city where resources are extremely limited and hungry, desperate mouths are in ample supply.

I can understand why somebody who lives in suburbia, who is well stocked and can fort up might want to bug in there, but I sure as heck can’t understand why anybody on the planet would want to bug out there.

During a bugout, your supplies will be very limited, so you need to either go to where you have pre-positioned preps, a family member who will provide for you… or you need to have a bunch of portable, highly desirable items and skills to trade.

For example, if you are a doctor, nurse, dentist or blacksmith, all you have to do to find a BOL is show up and announce yourself.

If you are an MBA or a lawyer? You’d better have something pre-positioned or something to trade.

Picking a primary bugout location and starting to get it set up

We spent a lot of time and effort scouting out our primary rural BOL, because of the limitations we imposed upon ourselves. 

1. It had to be some place at least 15 acres in size
2. It had to be within an easy one-day bicycle ride from our main residence
3. The property had to be suitable to develop for hunting, animals and gardening
4. The location either needed to have a pond or have a great location to build a pond
5. It had to be something we could afford, and by afford I mean pay cash (we’ve saved up money for over a decade)

All of these greatly limited our searching but we finally found something we could make work.

We purchased a small rural plot of land for the dual purpose of building a vacation / camping / hunting / fishing area and a fallback retreat. The 30 m/l acres is down rural paved road in northern Missouri, and is at least 100 miles from any town larger than 17,000 people. It has rural water and grid electricity at the property boundary, for use if we so choose.

The nearest neighbors are 1/4 mile away on either side east/west of us, but north and south we don’t have any neighbors for a good couple of miles either way. I was working on the fence area Sunday by the road and in the two hours I was there, not a car drove past. 

Now, we realize not every family can buy a BOL either because it’s too big of a financial burden or because of family dynamics (i.e. he or she says “no”).

Family

The next best choice for you may be with family, if you have some that have “like” views… of course, those families also need to be far enough away from you to make a difference… if you need to bugout from a hurricane and your brother or sister lives across town, well… that’s not really going to help, is it?

That brings me to my next idea…

“He’s like a brother to me” 

Almost everybody has had good friends that we have known for a very long time… the kind of friends we can trust intimately.

We have multiple sets of friends who have similar beliefs, including Doc who we’ve talked about here multiple times. These friends know that we are available to them, and they have made it known that they are available to us.

They are far enough away to make this a very viable option… to the point that (depending upon your relationship and the amount of space you each have available) pre-positioning assets is an option.

OPSEC isn’t nearly as important for people you see rarely

I get OPSEC concerns, I really do. 

Preppers have OPSEC drilled into their heads from day one, and while I agree that it is important, the level of importance diminishes with the distance the person you confide in lives from you and how much communication they have with people around you.

I can understand why people don’t want their neighbors to know they have households full of supplies, that makes a great deal of sense.

Worrying about OPSEC with somebody who lives 9 hours by car from? Being concerned they you know that you are a prepper, have a great water situation and are set up to feed your own family? That makes far less sense to me… especially if you live in the suburbs or the city, because NOBODY really thinks about bugging-in to the suburbs… that’s a place you leave if the SHTF, or hunker down… not a place you GO to.

Cash is king

Unless you have a bugout location absolutely nailed down, it becomes extremely important to keep a good amount of cash (I’m talking a STRONG amount… a month’s worth on the road including all expenses) available to grab and go at all times.

In an emergency, even a TEOTWAWKI type emergency, cash will be king early on.

People will have normalcy bias, and since cash has always been worth something, for the first few days of a crisis, they will still believe it.

I get people who have barter items, gold. silver, yes I understand… but in the first days of a crunch, people are not going to want .22LR bricks or waterproof matches or coffee in trade, they are going to want green pictures of Andrew, Abe & Ben. 

Pick a chain, get the app

I advise anybody who travels at least a little to pick a hotel / motel chain, get their rewards card and get the app… sure, the rewards are fine if you happen to stay enough to earn enough to get a free night’s stay here or there, but the real bonus (for as long as it works) of having a chain of motels you are loyal to is that you can quickly receive priority booking via their apps. 

Personally, we use the Wyndham Rewards system. They are on the budget side of things but we don’t require fancy. They generally have a motel just about anywhere we go.

As members of one of the biggest hotel group programs, there are very few places across the US we can’t just open up the app, get a room reserved, and forget about it. If you are caught in a mass bugout situation, you can get clear of the area, find a place you can get a room with the app, then book a week or two.

With our app, we guarantee the first night (generally you can cancel up until 4:00 PM the day of arrival) with no penalty for cancelling future stay dates.

If you and half a million people are bugging out, this may mean the difference of you staying a week in a comfortable room or spending a week sleeping in your car. Me? I’ll take the room.

Blue Highways

The first thing I plan on doing if I need to bug out and I am stuck in the city is to get out of town as fast as I can, then get myself over to a blue highway. What’s a blue highway? Something that isn’t an interstate. Something like an old fashioned US route. In our area, we have several of these. US 61, US 63, US 65, US 71… all odd numbers, all running north and south. Then we have US 136, US 36 running across the state east to west. These roads are full of small towns with available supplies and generally friendly people if you get away from the big cities. They also are far, far less likely to turn in to evacuation parking lots.

The key is that in a known bugout situation, get out of Dodge early.

Salty’s Note: Dodge City, KS is actually a great choice for a town to bug out to. Good size, has all the medical stuff you need, plenty of motel/hotel/camping available and more cattle around there than the could eat if it comes to that. You could do worse.

Campground / Van Camping

Another option that we are working on, but we don’t have done yet, is to convert a van over to a bugout vehicle, so that we can bail out and camp either in an RV campground, at a state or county campground, or if we are in an area with national forests where it is legal to camp, then just go off grid.

This option may be the best choice for those of you who just can’t afford a BOL, who don’t have out of town friends and family, and who need to bail. 

I would become a member of a campground group like GoodSam and hook myself up with their roadside service while I was at it. 

If you don’t have a camper, then it’s tent time… every prepper should have tents and sleeping bags/blankets available for everybody in the family, this needs to be a priority if you don’t. 

I’m not a fan of “bugging out into the woods” so I see this as a temporary solution, but sometimes that’s enough to get you by. 

Know Thy Season

Right now, if I had to bug out, you know where I would head? Panama City Beach, Florida… I could get a beachfront hotel room for $59 a night in a normal year (we often travel there in December for just this reason). However, since they got blown away by the hurricane and rooms are expensive right now where they are available, I would pick somewhere else down the coast, like $47.50 beachfront for a King at a budget (but 3.5 star rated on TripAdvisor.com) tonight using the membership code (as mentioned above). Remember rooms are dirt cheap in the offseason, if you have to leave your area, go where the rooms are available and dirt cheap. 

Winter? Wisconsin Dells, north Florida coast, fishing lodges, places like that.

Summer? Hunting lodges that are out of season. 

The small town, in town option

One more option that I’m a big fan of is setting up a retreat in a small town. I’ve covered that here in this article, so give it a look and see what you think.

https://beansbulletsbandagesandyou.com/bullets/2018/04/28/think-outside-the-box-set-up-an-low-cost-retreat-in-small-rural-town/

You need to be creative