Prepping’s lessons for quarantine

Interblog - October 15, 2020

Scenarios

Greetings.  My scenario stands at the 3-way intersection of prepping, quarantine, and vanlife, and it’s not a hypothetical scenario so much as an actual procedure that we had to follow, and may need to follow again.  

 This past summer, my husband and I drove our off-grid van almost 3,000 miles from our home in the U.S. to undeveloped land that I own in eastern Canada, observing the isolation rules along the way.  Once we crossed the border into Canada, we had to drive 450 miles without entering any premises or contacting any person.  And then we were legally required to remain on my property for two weeks, a property that contains no electrical, water, or sewer utilities – it’s just forested land with a small private road into it.  

 DH and I had already spent several years engineering our van with a solar-lithium-inverter-alternator-generator combination that makes us power-unlimited in most contexts, but I had to step up my game to enhance the rest of our preps, because we had never before been cut off from normal consumer supplies such as groceries, hardware, pharma, etc.  Some ideas I pull from the boating community, which is the other big group that is off-grid almost continually by definition, but increasingly I’m checking out the prepping community for ideas on strategies and gear.  Every piece of equipment has to be completely thought out and tested, ever piece has to be reliable, and every contingency has to be accounted for.  Plus, there are more comfortable and less comfortable ways of doing things, and I’d rather thrive than survive.

 We enjoyed our 2 weeks of “exile” (as my Canadian father called it) far more than we thought we would, to the point where I almost hope for the opportunity to do it again.  When do any of us get 2 unbroken weeks where we are completely segregated from society and not compelled to be answerable to outside demands on our time, where we can just focus on being present and developing our skills?  It hardly ever happens.  We’re looking forward to more, and for that, I need more learnin’. 

🙂

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Have you checked out any of the fibreglass camper sites? It’s a lot like living in a van or on a small boat. If you want to find a community with a lot of ideas for offgrid living, I would look there. There’s one guy I know of who lives in his 13 ft scamp year round somewhere in Minnesota.