On the two mile road where my cabin is located, there are a total of ten cabins. Every spring my wife and I laugh when the fools who stock their cabins with tools, atv's boats, and other saleable goods come down to find their possessions gone. My rules of thumb with maintaing my getaway are as follows,

1. Don't lock your cabin. When the vandals have to struggle to break in your cabin they invariably trash it.

2. Don't make anything obvious. If it is valuable, hide it. Your typical burglar/vandal will steal anything not glued down, but they won't look too hard for anything. One year a thief stole my $50 Snapper Comet riding mower even though it had no battery, no gas, and had three flat tires. Add to that he had to push it 100 feet and load it onto a truck. He was too lazy however to open the broom cabinet next to the fridge and steal my Bass Pro/Garcia, ultralight fishing rod and box of tackle.

3. Owning a cabin isn't a beauty pageant. My cabin is a 1958 mobile home that all the paint was falling off of. I painted it with red barn paint as I had some left over from painting my barn. I mow my lot occasionally, meaning three times a year. The thieves inevitably gravitate to the nicer looking cabins.

If you follow these simple rules, 9 time out of 10 your cabin will be left alone.

There are a billion places to hide stuff in your average home/ cabin. Take for instance cupboards. Ever wonder what is between the bottom of the lowest cupboard and the floor? Well I'll tell ya, nothing. Specifically about a five inch space of nothing. If a guy were to take a skil saw, cut out the bottom of the cupboards and fit them back in with concealed hinges, it is amazing what can be hidden. Not that I would know of course.

PVC, silica gel, and cosmoline make great undergound gun storage cabinets.

My backup heat to the woodstove is my 500 gallon propane tank.

Electricity doesn't really thrill me but I have a 1000 watt Honda generator which I keep at my house. If I don't have to go overland when the SHTF I'll take it with me.

My emergency water is the river. When you have a river so clear that you can watch the fish strike as you fish, some bleach or iodine is typically sufficient. I also have a hand pump on my well.

On the foodstuff issue, I'll say this. Over the last few years, when I go down I'll occasionally plant tomatos, and other vegetables. Not necessarily to tend in a garden, but so they are established. It would amaze you what certain unattended vegetables such as tomatos, squash, cucumber, and zucchini can do unattended. They will also come back year after year. The rest of my foodstuffs are still in the river, in the woods, or in the cabin.

Just a few ideas, YMMV.

Oh yeah, once you get used to snakes, they're no big deal. I typically ignore them and they ignore me.