The first in a series to make you think about things. Each of you will answer differently and you will all be right, or maybe wrong. It isn’t a sure thing with definitive Yes/No answers. There are no rights and wrongs only something to consider and plan for.
You have planned for a bug out retreat. You have stocked it with enough food to keep you and twenty five others alive for 10 years. You have a stockpile of seeds and equipment in your supplies and you have cultivated a large garden stocked with plants to give you your fresh vegetables and fruit. You even have an area put aside for chickens, ducks and pigs. A forest close by is full of plants you have placed and rabbits and pigeons are abundant. A stream flows by into a pond where you have fish and this provides water and food. Your four bed roomed house is running 12V from generated power via wind turbine, turbine in the stream and solar panels. You have utopia as far as preppers are concerned.
The problem you have though is that you were caught flat footed when the government announced martial law and restricted travel. Your retreat is only 20 miles away in the countryside but you couldn’t even leave your town. You had enough to keep you all fed and watered but the situation deteriorated until riots were commonplace and the checkpoints were abandoned as troops left their posts to go home. You take advantage of that to abandon your home and move to your retreat as planned. You wait a further week until the exodus calms down and then you decide to make a run for it. Fast yet carefully, keeping a careful eye out for roadblocks and opportunists. You leave at first light and it takes you two hours to drive using the main roads and driving round abandoned vehicles. You encounter no roadblocks or major issues.
Still early in the morning you arrive at the retreat to find it occupied. There is one vehicle in the drive, many of your crops have been picked, you can’t see any livestock, your barn has been broken into and is wide open with stores moved around. Clearly searched. There is no one around and it looks like everyone in the house is still fast asleep. Daddy bear and his family are staying at your retreat and in your bed.
What are you going to do now?
Well I am going to have to go back a little on this thought. First off if I had a place all set up and only 20 miles away I would have had my fandango planted on it way before all of this went down.
Commute of 20 miles would have been nothing and only a days walk (maybe more and dependent on conditions)and could have bugged out to it from the upheavel of the other place.
But as your scenerio goes, makes it tougher. If you had planned for such a thing I would think that you would of had stuff (guns and such) stashed so that you could take your place back. See money (meaning job) is ruling the situration, plus kids in school etc. You were probably thinking that best to stay put till all hell breaks loose. Seems that is much to late.
As far as taking the place back well seems now you are in a pickle. If I had left the place unprotected, I think I would have hid as much as possible (especially weapon’s)so they weren’t used against me. I would have had the majority of my food stuffs hid as well.
I would think that you would have to watch the place and see how many jerks were there. Then make a plan to take them out one by one. All you can do now is read the situation and see if there is any hope of the possibility of your taking the place back.
So I say before this happens, move to the 20 acres. And seems you need to fortify, fortify, fortify. I realize the place was unprotected and easy to take over, but, yeah you needed to be out there and make it hard for such a thing to happen with you there.
Sorry, but if I had a BOL like that, I’d be living in it full time.
Luddite, In your case you went away to visit a relative and got stuck there until in a sudden coup martial law was declared.
Daddy bear will be encouraged to leave immediately, with a nudge from my shotgun, I was nudged with a shotgun once and told to go forth, it works.
My only relatives are in Australia, lol. But I see what you’re getting at.
The only trouble is, I don’t know what I’d do. As a small, soon-to-be-elderly female, there’s not a lot I can do in that situation, other than go and live in the woods and hope they leave when the stashed food they DID find ran out (I would have other sources which were hidden).
Stan,
One solution.
Luddite,
OK, you don’t know what to do. Now you have some time you can think about it, plan hidey holes and tactical plans.
Thats what this is all about. Making people think ahead about things they might not think of themselves.
are you going to put an answer here
Maddog,
I wasn’t going to because it was just to make you think but I’ll think about it.