In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s mantra is “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home”, and the entire movie is pretty much about her following a yellow brick road to get there. Many of us spend a good chunk of our lives away from home, whether it’s at work, on vacation, visiting family or friends, or just going on a camping, hunting or fishing trip. If you spend any amount of time more than a few miles (or kilometers) away from your home or bug-out location (BOL), there’s a chance that an emergency or disaster might strike while you’re away, requiring you to travel your own personal yellow brick road to get back. While there have been a number of articles by myself and others in SurvivalBlog.com about kitting out a Get Home Bag (GHB), less attention has been paid to planning how you would get back to your home or BOL. The purpose of this article is to provide some tips and guidance to help you plan your journey home from wherever you may be when disaster strikes.
Documentation
Unless you’re blessed with an eidetic memory or you only ever travel to one of two nearby locations, you’re going to need some method of creating, storing, organizing, and updating get-home route plans. I highly recommend Joplin, which is a free open-source note-taking tool that supports formatted text, embedded images, attached files, and many other features, and is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. It also supports synchronization of all notes (and hence your route plans) between multiple devices using a wide range of cloud services. This allows me to create and manage my get-home route plans on my desktop computer and easily access them on my mobile device when I’m on the road.
Note that once you’ve created a route plan you’ll need to run Joplin on your mobile device to synchronize a local copy, which you’ll want to do before you start traveling, since Internet access will probably be one of the first things to go in many disasters. I have a Nextcloud personal cloud service running on a Raspberry Pi on my home network for synchronizing Joplin (among other things), so I don’t have to worry about anyone else reading my notes, and Joplin also supports strong end-to-end encryption to protect my data in transit. I’ve created a Joplin template that I use every time I create a new route plan; it has predefined sections for everything I want to cover.Continue reading“Follow the Yellow Brick Road – Part 1, by J.M.”