When only one person has an interest in something in a marriage it’s going to be a hard sell to do a lot of things as the disinterested person just doesn’t care.


Tent camping is an excellent way to develop outdoor survival skills. A lot of the things you need to tent camp lend themselves to self reliance. Through primitive camping you develop skills to survive in a disaster, you develop the skills to know what to take with you when you have to leave your home. You acquire the items and tools needed to survive in the middle of nowhere. You develop an idea of how much food to take, how to keep warm on a cold night, how to build and cook over a fire. And a lot of other things I can’t think of off hand. And if you go at it with the right frame of mind, it’s a lot of fun.


Hard to say where to store items, not knowing what your home looks like it’s impossible to say. Food is the most important and will probably take up the most space. Buy a nice cabinet or shelving unit and put it in your basement and fill it with food that doesn’t require refrigeration. The local grocery store is filled with a very large selection of food that taste good, is long lasting, easy to prepare and a lot less expensive then freeze-dried food. If you only buy a few items every time you do the weekly shopping it will take no time to have a good supply of food.

Also buy a good water filter. I have a Katadyn (there are many good brands out there) water filter; you need clean safe water to cook with. Camping stores will have them or look on-line.

Buy some duffel bags (I find used ones for $2.00 or less at garage sales all the time) and fill them up with the food you think you need to survive if you were ever in a position to have to bug-out.

As far as the space it takes up I live alone and a large duffle bag full of food can feed me for 2-weeks and I will have food left over. I go on camping vacations and this is how it works out. So even a small space can give you the needed room to store a few weeks of food.

Even if your husband can’t be made to become part of your preparedness preparations, you can still put away food, after all I would guess you to the shopping.



As far as hunting, it’s not a skill I think most people should depend on without doing it a lot before a survival situation arises. Best to get into it now (legally, no poaching a few animals in the neighbors field) to develop the skills. Game animals don’t like to die any more then you do, they all have developed the ability to avoid danger. You need to understand how to hunt them to consider them as a source of food. That includes the work of field dressing and cooking them. This alone keeps a lot of people from hunting game. It’s a messy job in a lot of peoples mind and they just can’t get past it, better to find out now if it’s for you.

But if you can get him interested in the camping (it’s a lot less money to go camping then to stay in a motel, pick places that you can vacation and camp) he will through doing it develop survival skills that could pay off down the road. It also gives you the ability to know what does and does not work for you. What one person says is an absolutely needed item, another person will not use. Neither one is wrong, they just do things differently. I see almost no need for a lot of the knifes you see people talk about on this site, I would not and in 50-years have not needed them. But the people using them do find a valuable use to them. Using things while camping allows you to thin out all the unneeded items and have the ones that work for you. This way in a bug out you are not carrying a bunch of dead weight you will never need.