Category: Retreat Locales

From Zero to Prepared in Five Years, by Jon the Marine

At the young age of 17 and a half after having completed High School earlier than most of my peers and with parental consent, I joined the United States Marine Corps. The date was June of 1999. The next four years of my life would be interesting, exciting, dangerous, and eye opening. Quickly making me leave the naive boyhood I had then, and realizing what a dark place most of the world really is. At the end of my four year commitment, I returned home from a year deployment in Afghanistan, and chose to discharge honourably once my contract was …


Shopping For Your Survival Retreat, by John J.

One of the hardest things to do in living a survivalist lifestyle is acquiring a retreat. You’ll discover rather quickly that your finances will determine the type and size of property you’ll be able to purchase. Another problem which you will encounter is determining where you should buy your retreat. The area you’re looking at property in should be done with a good deal of research. You’re likely to come across many types of deals in your search and you’ll discover that some are better than others, but you need to find the one that’s right for you. This of …


Letter Re: Spring Location Web Page

JWR: I came upon the Find A Spring web site the other day, thought it might be interesting. Water being one of the most important assets in a great time of need, just maybe it is closer and better than your tap. Look up the closest natural spring to your location at Find A Spring. Bring all your water carrying gear and try it out to see how it tastes. Some of these springs mention sulphur or other tastes. You might find that it is the best water you have ever tried, best of all it is natural and typically …


Letter Re: Life of the Farm in Western Australia

Hi, I have only started reading your web site recently and I must admit I am a little nonplussed. I am a farmer living on the far edge of the Western Australian Wheatbelt, 400 km from Perth (capitol city) and I grow a vegie garden, we buy food in bulk and have at least 6months in the pantry,being a farmer I have a rifle( I generally only use it to kill crook sheep and shoot rabbits), we have a 50 tree fruit orchard and preserve our own fruit, we are on the power grid but we do have a generator …


Letter Re: The Advent of McBunkers

Hi Mr. Rawles, Here’s an interesting article I just came across: Bunker Mentality: The Ultimate Underground Shelter. This is the web site for the company: Terra Vivos. I guess this concept was inevitable and I would expect that more companies would get into this business. While I don’t fault anyone from wanting to be prepared, I just see tremendous logistical problems that I doubt would be surmountable. It also seems to me that these “McBunkers” might represent a large bullseye target from opportunists. Take care, – BB JWR Replies: I agree! Be very wary of large scale commercial ventures with …


Letter Re: Advice on Moving Offshore

J. Rawles: My wife and I have the chance to buy a farm in the Toledo [southern] district of Belize. With our savings, and [with] what we net out of selling [our house] in San Diego, I can afford to pay cash for it. I really feel the need to “Get Outta Dodge”. The farm has two springs and a creek. I’m self-employed. I write software, freelance, mostly for my former employer. I earn around $80K per year. That [much income] is considered a fortune [in Belize.] I speak decent Spanish, and my wife is fully fluent [in Spanish]. (She …


A Practical, Full Spectrum Suburban Survival Plan, by JIR

Survival planning can be overwhelming and a lot of the advice you get is not practical or compatible with our lifestyles. A lot of us choose, or are forced to live in the crowded East Coast far too close to cities to survive TEOTWAWKI. I dare say, a lot of SurvivalBlog readers live in suburbs just outside medium to large population centers. Many of us have jobs that don’t migrate to small towns and would face a substantial loss of income if we moved away from our livelihoods. Some of us like our current lives and feel that hunkering down …


Letter Re: Demographics and Population Density Map Resources

Mr. Rawles: I’ve seen a few posts mentioning Population Density maps, but what I’ve seen so far doesn’t let you really drill into a particular geographic region. Webfoot has population density maps (among other demographics) based on the 2000 census, and using Google Maps. With webfoot you can drill down to a city level and get a good granular picture of an area, instead of inferring density from a static, US-wide map. It can be a little slow to load, but the wait is worth it. So if you’re like me, and trapped in the Northeast, you can use this …


Suburban Survival, by The Suburban 10

I am a public school teacher with five kids and one income. There is little in the way of extra cash to protect the family, but I will do my best to prepare for TEOTWAWKI. If you want to plan well; plan as if it was a lesson plan and you are going to teach it to a class. My class is my family the the goal being not to get anyone panicked (Refer to # 9 below). Having a receptive audience is difficult, because of what I deem…complacent comforts. These are built into the core and routine of our …


A Personal Journey in Preparedness, by Mountain Man

I’m fairly new to SurvivalBlog but now it’s an every day read. I wanted to write and share my own journey of preparedness with you and your readers. After living with three and a half million people for about 22 years, a move to the country was long over due. I made the decision to get out of the city back in 1999, when I starting to take things a bit more seriously with all of the talk about Y2K. I was really hoping that something would have happened back then so I could test my skills at being prepared …


Letter Re: Northeastern Colorado as a Retreat Locale

Dear Mr. Rawles: Having read both of the letters about Northeastern Colorado Retreats and having personally lived the general area since 1967 I wish to offer the following comments. I believe there are merits in both letters. The area is best described as semi-arid with an annual rainfall in the range of 12-13 inches per year; but, keep in mind we are recovering from a 10 year drought with average annual rainfall around 8 inches. These averages are accurate as our family has farmed and have kept accurate records since 1973. We have a large garden and routinely can more …


A “10% Test” Survival Trip by C.J. in Helena Montana Edited by Capt. Barr

I work as an independent hospital contractor. Our home base is in Montana, but I am independent. I work as temporary health care staff at hospitals, being licensed in about 5 states. I usually make pretty good money traveling, but I miss having a fixed point in case of crisis. My wife and I really enjoy living in Montana, we were having a good life: hunting in the mountains panning for gold and camping. While working at a good paying contract, the hospital I was with had asked about renewing the job for another several weeks. I accepted the renewal …


Letter Re: Northeastern Colorado as a Retreat Locale

James: I read this article and I must say that I have a few disagreements with it. I grew up in Washington County, Colorado. Yes, it’s a wide open space with some farming, lots of ranching and a general self-reliant attitude, but there is a definite downside. 1) Weather – the weather in this area is turbulent to say the least. Expect occasional white-outs and definite bone chilling wind all the long winter. Summers are either dry enough to scorch crops or rain, hail or tornado’s flood do their thing. In all the years our family has farmed in the …


Letter Re: Northeastern Colorado as a Retreat Locale

Sir, Having lived in the northeastern corner of the state for the past 16 years (retired from the Air Force in 1994), I can give you some accurate information about the area for your readers who are considering moving to a retreat area. The northeast is a very sparsely populated part of the state. I live in Washington county which has an area of some two million plus acres but only has about 5,000 or so people living here. The area is mainly in farming and ranching, and the far eastern part of this corner of the state is located …


Letter Re: A G.O.O.D. Memorial Day Weekend Test

Dear Jim, Greetings and thank you, to you and all your wonderful contributors of the past. As most of us live in the ‘City’ or suburb of the ‘City’, there is a feeling of when TEOTWAWKI occurs, we will grab our G.O.O.D. bag get in our vehicle and head out to our personal retreat, hidden from the Golden Horde. One quick question – when will the TEOTWAWKI occur? What date? What time? And how will we know it has occurred? As I have read most of the writings from the beginning until now, I seem to have missed that date, …