You have a years supply of food , and still have to bug out, due to an incident like what was shown recently on the Disaster Channel. You can't take all the supplies with you...what do you do?
Do you shelter in place, fighting off any looters? Invite 4-6 friends, telling them to bring as much food as possible, realizing there may be relative safety in numbers?
Assuming you don't have a secondary residence available, and your next best shelter is a friend 1000 miles away, what would you do?

Well - do we have to bug out, or stay and fight off looters?

My car with a full tank and 3 x 5 gallon cans of gas will just about get me 1,000 miles in 3-5 days without diversions. If that 1,000 miles is like travelling across Mad Max land (a la Discovery/Disaster channel) then no amount of food or gas is going to help me get there - might as well join a wandering tribe and take the scenic route.

If I had to leave behind a year's supply of food I would probably hide it in inobvious places - attic, or below ground in my crawlspace, its nice and cool there, I could always dig it below grade to conceal it, line it with plastic etc. Reality is most scavengers will stay in the living area of the house and not chop through the floor to investigate a crawl space (and I pretty much guarantee they wouldn't find the access). Then if I happened back towards my house someday I might have a year's supply of food waiting for me. I might split up the food into several caches if I could think of several really clever places to hide them - generally I'm not that clever though.

One of the most successful species on the planet would find your foodstuffs (the common rat) if you stored them in said locations. You might as well have a big party and invite some of your favorite looters.

If you cannot shelter in place, take what you can and distribute that which you don't need or can't carry to those around you who you deem most deserving. I don't know the formula for differentiating such things. In a postapocalyptic world, who would be a good guy? You are competing with everyone else for resources, as they are depleted, civility will most definitely wane.

You said we had to bug out then gave the option to stay and fight ? Which is it ???

If my nearest friend was 1,000 miles away my first priority would be to make more/closer friends

The bones of my plan are that we stay in one car rather than split into two. Both of our cars are very reliable, and I think fuel availability will be more important than vehicle redundancy or cargo capacity. I also want to avoid getting split up. Another reason is that with two drivers in one car we can go for a lot longer than we can in two. If necessary and if fuel is available we can drive for at least 24 hours continuously that way.

I'm too close to a major city to think that I could stand off waves of hungry, desperate people.

I will address both condtions, since it appears there may be an option. It would be much better to stay and shelter in place if that is possible. I have all my supplies, equipment, and local support group at hand if we can all stay at our homes. In that case, I believe I am more than adequately prepared.

However, if something compels me to leave, then I would have compartmentalized my supplies so that I can take a good cross section of what I feel I would need to bug out with to get to 1,000 miles or more, with the possible exception of not enough gas on hand.

Were I to leave, and I had the time to prepare properly, there'd be a few abandoned and forgotten cisterns nearby that I would be happy to drop some supplies into for the longer term.

Realistically, no one should worry about bugging out with a year's supply of food or other materials. At most, maybe enough for a couple months subsistence would be the most you'd need in a bug out situation. My reasoning is if things get so bad that you would need more some where else, then why bother to leave? If not, then you should be able to resupply in short order or otherwise provision adequately. You need to take enough to get you where you need to get, but not so much it inhibits your mobility.

Good point - that must be why I am lousy at post-apocalyptic scenarios and you are the King of the Jungle!

I vote for leaving the food neatly stacked for the next guy to find. There are no bad guys when the chips are down and people are hungry - if the world has devolved to the point that it can't feed itself, and folks are scavenging for my year's supply, to hell with it. If things really fall apart, possession constituting the highest value doesn't really mean much to me. I'll have already lost alot of things more valuable than my cache of food. This is why I think these apocalyptic scenarios are mostly useless - it posits that people will stop acting like people once a certain threshold has been passed. That's fine for science fiction, but relevance to this forum??

Entirely relevent, and a part of reality in much of the world already, unfortunate and sad to say. Some people will stop acting civil in times of desperation and a lack of authoritative control is presents itself. Our time for such behavior on a large scale will come soon enough. For now, we can continue to enjoy living a soft, relatively low-risk lifestyle.

Equipped to Survive includes planning for the inevitable. If you go out in public, you should expect that sooner or later you will be confronted with the ugly reality that there are a lot of people out there willing to use whatever force they can to separate you from your belongings. No one else is going to stop them. So if you don't plan to, then expect to have nothing eventually. That may be a fine and acceptable outcome for some, but I have responsibilities and commitments still that preclude me from such a carefree attitude.

Today, my attitude is you can have what I am willing to give you, or what the government takes from me and gives you as redistribution (and only because I can't stop them, for now), nothing more. I can and will fight you and anyone else hard for the rest of what is mine.

A Short Wheelbase Ford Transit will easily carry a years supply or food for 2 people. A years food supply for 2 adults works out at around 600-800kg. A ford transit is capable of carrying double this amount. There is bound to be someone in the local area with a similar vehicle (plumber or building contractor) where you can offer 6 months of food for getting out of dodge. Having 6 months food supply is a lot better than having none. Remember also to take your packets of seeds with you as well along with your gardening tools. You may have to cut open the vehicle roof above the passenger side to mount the machine gun nest of course. Just watched Hot Fuzz on BluRay

http://www.fordtransitdirect.co.uk/newsales/newvans/transit/swb.aspx

It seems sheltering in place and fighting off looters would be preferable to bugging out and putting youself out among the looters. If at all possible, I would opt for staying put, keeping a low profile and hopefully avoid the attention of the roving bands.