If 2020 has taught us anything, its that we can not be too prepared. However, beyond the pandemic there are other reasons to get prepared for an emergency, i.e… a house fire, a car accident, or natural disaster. And here in California, between the earthquakes and wildfires, we are definitely not strangers to natural disasters.
We began putting our emergency bags, (sometimes referred to as a Go Bag or a Bug Out Bag) together a number of years ago. In full disclosure, my husband is a prepper and does a lot of the research for the equipment that go into each bag. He is also the one that pushed to have multiple bags. Nonetheless, I completely agree with being prepared, but I hope that we never have to use them.
When we initially started putting together our bags, I created Our Family Survival Guide. It is meant to help us remember all things that are suggested to go in our bags and it also contains tips for use if ever faced with a survival situation.
You may have caught that I mentioned we have bags. Not a typo, we have several bags. We keep a bag in each our vehicles and we have a main bag that is kept in the garage. That last bag is for our toddler and is kept in the garage along our main bag. Each bag is actually a backpack, so that we are able to keep our hands free.
Lets get into the contents of each bag, starting with the Vehicle Go Bag. Both of the bags have identical contents and are water bladder backpacks:
Here is our main Go Bag. It is a camping/hiking backpack:
And lastly, we have our daughter’s Go Bag. We are using her old diaper bag:
Since our little girl is too young to remember names and numbers, I zip-tied this laminated photo to the inside of her bag. It is a recent photo of our family with the date of the photo, our ages, names, and phone numbers. (Note: This same photo is included in each bag, but her bag is the only one its zip-tied to.)
We try to check the bags yearly to make sure information is update. However, we have to update the clothes and activities in our daughter’s bag every six months.
We absolutely hope to never need these bags, but we can rest easy knowing that we are prepared.
Iesha
