Beans, Bullets, Bandages & You
Beans, Bullets, Bandages & You
Episode 232: Connect With Your People
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Salty & Spice talk about a case study of how pre-planning can save your bacon and prevent problems from becoming emergencies.
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Hello, everybody.
Salty:Hello everybody and welcome to the show the Big Show, the most important and critically acclaimed podcast is quartered in our car. Welcome to the show. Today we're driving the heavy stereo and with teen 174 r p. m is going right down this little kind of rickety two lane, quote unquote highway. It's a state highway. And if you want to know why that's important, you should read Spicer's recent article on finding your way around, not using a GPS. But that's not what we're here to talk about today.
Spice:This is another prepper case, though. prepper cases are a new kind of article, I thought it would be kind of fun, where I describe a situation where salty and I have needed to rely on our preps and have done so either successfully or not so much. To resolve the situation. We lay out the situation. And then you get to take the quiz. How would you handle a similar situation? Or the preps you have on hand including your discussions with your family members, your skills and your physical stuff? sufficient to deal with the problem posed? How would you do it? So here's the situation. Once upon a time, salty, and I were visiting a town about 100 miles from here, beautiful day, nice day for a bike ride, they've got a great bike trail that terminates kind of close to the town starts out always a long way away. So we're going to ride on this bike trail. Well, I'm up for a good long ride that day, but salty recently got over a knee surgery, and he can ride but he can't ride the distances he was riding before the injury. So working his way back up
Salty:at that point in time.
Spice:Yeah. So he can't ride as far as I can. But he's got some other stuff he wants to do. It's a beautiful day to take some pictures. He drops me off a ways down the trail. I think it was like 6070 miles that day, or something like that. Drops me off on the trail, we have a plan on meeting at the parking lot close to the edge of the town that I'm going to be riding toward. And off I go. It's a beautiful day, it's beautiful ride, I enjoy the ride a whole lot. For the first about, oh, you know, 50 miles 55 miles getting close to the point where we're supposed to meet. And this trail is an old rail trail that runs between river bluffs and River. But the river got a little naughty. In the last few weeks, the river does get muddy from time to time they do these things, and did had undercut the trail eroded the trail and the trail had fallen off completely into the river. So normally, when there's a trail problem, I just pick up the bicycle and Portage around it. That's one advantage to traveling on a bike instead of in a car.
Salty:Worst case, you could generally just go back to the road last road and hop on the road a little bit and work your way around it. But this is not that kind of a trail. There is no road.
Spice:There's a fairly long stretch where the trail is pinned right between the river and the river Bluffs, which are straight up cliffs of 4050 feet high. So beautiful place to ride a bike
Salty:up to 150 feet. I mean, you're not Yeah, these are. These are cliffs.
Spice:I'm not portaging a bicycle over that. I couldn't climb that
Salty:podcast thing.
Spice:We take a lot of pictures of this place because it's beautiful, nice place to ride a bike. So it ain't happening. Okay, I live in the modern world, I pull out my cell phone to call salty and tell them I'm not going to make that rendezvous. But limestone river bluffs do a great job of blocking cell signal, especially in a rural place where there's not many towers. I got nothing.
Salty:And unbeknownst to her but known to is the fact that I'm actually not very far away from her. Supposedly, that's the plan anyway.
Spice:And he may not have signal. I don't have signal yet.
Salty:I know that parking lot where I parked does not have cell phones, just because it's down in a river valley. And they just, it doesn't have signal.
Spice:So modern nightmare, right need to connect with somebody and there's no cell signal.
Salty:And she's now 120 530 miles from home. It's in the afternoon and yes, she could make it on her bike, but it would probably be after dark by the time she could get home on her bike.
Spice:Probably. It'd be dark before I could make it back to the spot where he dropped me off 50 miles up the trail. You know what I'm doing? Yeah. So getting home by myself is wasn't a thing we wanted to do either. And getting back to the first spot. I could do it. And it's a fallback plan, but not my first call. So
Salty:Become 100 plus miles of biking on a casual Sunday or Saturday afternoon on a gravel trail. And if you haven't ridden on a gravel trail, there's such hard rolling resistance. So even though they're very flat, because it's a rail trail, you get a lot of rolling resistance. So it's it's some work to write off.
Spice:Yeah, I could do it, but I'd be a tired puppy, and it would take me a while. So that's the basic situation, you are in a spot with somebody you care about, far from home, you need to make connections, your original plan falls through completely. Maybe you drop them off at a conference and go to explore the town or something like that. You're supposed to pick them up later, whatever the original plan to reconnect fails, you don't have any way to connect with them electronically? How are you going to do it? And how successful Are you going to be? I hope that you will, if it's safe to do so pause the podcast right here, formulate a real answer. And then check your answer with the other person. Because we've done that before and what one person's assumptions on what they should do did not match the other person's assumptions on what they were going to do. So we learned that trick, please do that. Now. Check it out, and check with your partners to see what they would have done about it too, and see if you would have matched up easily. Okay, now we're back.
Salty:Before we go on, do you need to stop and get driving?
Spice:I do not stop it. I'm dead.
Salty:We're driving past one of these. One of the many Mennonite stores that we go to to get our prepping supply crossing right along baby carrots.
Spice:So the carrot cake either. So what we did, sorry, not sorry, our story does not have a traumatic ending.
Salty:Nope, nothing dramatic about it.
Spice:I turned around. I went back just a few miles up the road took a short side spur on a break in the river bluffs to where I knew there was another trail inlet. And before I got all the way up to that parking lot, here's salty, pedaling down on his bike going for his bike ride. He had gotten to the far end, seen the notice that they had there that the trail was closed just a few miles up.
Salty:Actually your gut. That's right so far, but I'll bet you don't know what I did next. Take it. I hopped on my bike. And it said because it said trail was closed like six miles down towards it. So I rode the six miles towards where the trail was closed to see if it was really closed. Or what are these? Yeah, pick your bike up, stick it over your shoulder and and carry it 30 feet, which is sometimes what these trail closures are. Yeah. People just ignore them and go around them or or there's a pathway that you can get around it through the woods or something like that. No, this this baby was closed that path. It was gone. It was River. It was cliff, it was.
Spice:So now he knows I'm not on that chunk of trail between him and the closure. So he went back to the place we had already decided was going to be our fallback meeting position, started down the trail to see if I was there. He probably I'm guessing checked at the trailhead. See if there was a note for me yet.
Salty:I did. Yep. But I didn't think the time would work. Yeah, I had to drive. Well, first of all, she traveled at 17 miles an hour on the trail. That does not sound like much less, you're a cyclist. But if you're riding on a gravel trail at 70 miles an hour, actual time not. She's going 70 miles an hour. Now that's actual travel time, including stops and all that stuff. It's a cumulative 17 mile an hour. So I can pretty easily calculate where she's gonna be. Unless she has a flat, which you know, happens. But unless she has a flat, I know that you know, from this town to this town, it's gonna take her 15 minutes and from this town, so I could pretty well tell exactly where she's gonna be. I got a pretty good idea. But that's just knowing, knowing your partner and knowing your situation and knowing how things work. And I know how fast she could possibly get there. And then after that, it's it's a matter of Okay. Is she going a little slow? Did she have a problem? Did she decide to stop and look at the flowers? You know, this kind of stuff. She's not much of a stopping look, flowers person. She likes to watch them in a blur. I'm a soft flowers person. Which is fine. That's why we don't ride together because we just don't ride the same speed. Yeah, case you were wondering. But anyway, so I went, I checked to make sure that the closed was actually closed and it was and then I got back to my car and loaded the bike back in and went dry. Your plan B. And as I got there, I got out of the car, I got on my bike with a pad of paper, and a pen, I was she gets to the end, she sees the car, she uses her key she gets in the car, we're good. So I don't need to leave a note that she knows where I'm going to be parking. So I go down to the mic, My idea is to go down to the spur head and leave a note on the kiosk as to which way I went, and guessing what time it was, I would have gone this way or that. And I also noticed on the couch was there a sign that says trail closed ahead, there was not. So she would not have known that the trail was closed. I know she could be down that way. So that's why I was going to, but she caught me before I got to the kiosk. Yep, she had already gone past she was making good.
Spice:And if that parking lot had been closed, and he couldn't get down to the trail from that route, plan, See? See, I was counting to see where we were, would have been for me to go all the way back to our original drop off point. And make connections they're headed
Salty:towards. Yeah. And
Spice:check notes. Along the way,
Salty:I know, we've written this trail, a bunch of times, I know every single parking lot along the way, and just just as you hit towards a parking area, they're usually anywhere from six to 11 miles apart, as you get every single parking area to look to see if I'm there or look to see if I've left a note I if I don't have a pad of paper, we have a signal that we actually literally scraped into the ground up the trail at a particular spot as to k. Use that before too. Because we we do this. We've actually been doing this since before reliable cell phones on the entire trail. So it's kind of a big deal, you're leaving a family member out there kind of alone by themselves.
Spice:That's the thing. We're talking about being far away from home and far away from most of the people who would we would know who would be able to call and help us. So being able to make connections with your people again, especially when you're far away from home is a big deal. And that's why I wanted to do this case. Now, some features that I want to show in the plan, we, of course had a plan to meet each other. And we had our cell phones. And then we had actually three backup plans. After that. The first one worked. If that one hadn't worked, the second one would have worked, but I would have been pretty tired by the time I got there. And I'd have been riding in the dark. Okay, on a rail trail, but not optimal.
Salty:would have worked those gates, OR gates that are not lighted.
Spice:I would have been hoping it was a mooning moon lit night. I don't remember if it was it wasn't because I was not that long. The last fallback plan would have been to then call for other assistance, like call 911 and say, Hey, I had all these plans couldn't make connection with the guy. Maybe he had a car accident or something after that. Well, you get the idea. It's called for outside help at that point. Yeah. So we had several layers of backup plans. Because being separated from the people you care about when you're far away from home, and none of you can get well, not all of you can get home reliably and safely. Without a major hassle. That's a big deal. And it's worth having plans and making sure everybody knows the plans.
Salty:I will tell you, in today's world might one of my biggest concern in the prepper world right now, maybe my biggest concern is the vast over reliance people put on cell phone. They're relying on cell phones and cell phones only for communications. And this is a really bad idea because cell phone networks go down. And if your cell phone networks go down, that means your Facebook app go down. I mean, your partner app goes down that means you're What's it, whatever it is
Spice:Instagram, text, everything all of its gone, you lose everything.
Salty:You lose your means to communicate via that phone, you need to have a backup plan. I
Spice:mean, what if I had instead wiped out psychos squirrel runs in front of me and I hit psycho squirrel. It's happened before and I end up kind of smearing across the trail a little bit. I've broken my bike in those situations. I was able to do a trail fix and hobble at home into high gear but I got there, but there's no guarantee that the bike is going to be writable after that there's no guarantee that my person is going to be bikable after that I could easily landed on the phone and squished it or it falls out of my pocket and drops down into the river. Things happen. So having these these plans, it turned what could have been a major hassle of a problem caused by that washed out trail into a minor inconvenience and we both still got a beautiful ride in and it was a nice day.
Salty:Another aspect of it, which I doubt she's touched on, but I think is a very important is not only are our safety plans, important for our own safety, like when we're riding on the trail, but we can be of a great assistance to people who weren't planning and who weren't paying attention for. Here's a couple of example, let me give you a couple of the Skeeter tire.
Spice:Yes, that was memorable. I remember the Skeeter tire.
Salty:Oh my gosh,
Spice:I am the squatter of many skeeters. Go ahead.
Salty:Okay, we're riding on the on the same trail over by St. Charles. And we were down in the river bottom area where there's a lot of trees, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful area,
Spice:wetlands, wetlands, right
Salty:next maintained by beavers, and the boss. And it was getting on towards night. We were good. And then we saw these this pair of nice, older people, I want to say they're our age now. At the time, they were older people, but they were walking the bike because she had a flat. She had no way of fixing her. And I'm like, Well, you know, they're five miles from town and it towards dark. There's again, there's no way on this trail to that section. You know, you're walking the thing. And I'm like, okay, so I pull we pull over. We are riding together at this point in time. And I noticed that the, the bike has the same size of tire that my bike has, and I was carrying a couple extra tubes. So like, I can spare these people too. So I said, Well, you know, would you like us to help you out with the change of your tire and get you going again, and that would be very helpful and all this kind of and all sudden, I feel is kind of stinging in my neck. swatted mosquito, the mosquitoes had discovered the Boothbay and we were it,
Spice:it's not usually a problem when you're biking because you bike faster than the mosquitoes fly.
Salty:But when you're down, man, that was the fastest tire change I think I have ever done in my life. She's, they were like, excuse me, I'm really gonna sit Sorry, I popped by the tire off the thing. Now it was a it was a dirt bike was a department store bike. So I actually carry a wrench in my toolbox, too. So I could take the the actual the department store bikes apart because they don't have the quick releases. They have the the bolt on nuts, but actually carry a wrench just for this situation. Our
Spice:bikes don't require the tools but lots of bikes do.
Salty:Yeah, so I pop the tire thing off, I pop the tire off, pull the tube out. Alright, I have no idea what I was talking about. We got
Spice:we are changing somebody's tire in the middle of Skeeter bottom,
Salty:we just got stopped by a police officer. So we had to deal with that.
Spice:Somebody didn't change our license over. I'm not saying salty. By the way the license office person didn't
Salty:Yeah, the license office license
Spice:exchange right when we got as
Salty:far as our registration, matched our other car for these plates, yada, yada, yada. And he was just wondering what was going on, but he was very nice. And we're gonna do a podcast about how to deal with police officers when you get stopped, because there are several things that you can do. That will make your life much easier if you get stopped by a police officer and I just did them. And you know, that was a very painless trip by the fact that we weren't actually doing illegal.
Spice:That always helps. always helps. So
Salty:anyway, changing the tire, and we had to one person holding a bike. One person changing a tire that was me and two people doing nothing but swatting mosquitoes, literally
Spice:Yeah, I was swatting mosquitoes and salty skeeters. And I think the husband was keeping the skeeters off of his wife who is holding her bike and himself. At the same time. That was a one fast tire change.
Salty:We got that tire changed out and I got a partially I got them partially filled up and I'm like look, okay, that we can sprint sprint to that road over there. Okay, and then I'll finish I'll finish up because that's in the sun. Yeah, get back into the sun. So she wrote the quarter mile up to the road and then we stopped. I finished up,
Spice:pumping it up,
Salty:pumping it up, making sure everything was tight. thing was straight and
Spice:so we were able to do a good deed there. And that's We're doing
Salty:okay.
Spice:But the main thrust we're going for here is, we had several layers of plans, and we had talked about them, it's not like you have to make a big drama out of this. But whenever we separate when we're away from home, we make sure to say, Okay, so I'm going to meet you at this place at this time. And if you're not there, I'm going to do this. And if that doesn't work, I'm going to do that. We just takes 15 seconds, but we say it out loud. And make sure everybody's on the same page, before we break connection with each other. Because it can be a very unhappy feeling to not know how you're going to reconnect with the people you need to reconnect to, when you're a long way from home, particularly if you're a long way from everybody.
Salty:And as important as that is, there's also one other piece of the puzzle that you have to keep in mind, you have to not only make the plans, but you have to have the ability to execute those plans, for example, if you'd like. Okay, well, we're gonna meet back to the starting point, well, are you fit enough to make it back to the starting point? Do you have the supplies? Do you have the water? To make it back to the starting point? Do you have supplies so that if you have a flat tire, for example, you can fix a flat tire and make it back to the starting point, because of the traveling speed on bicycle versus foot is totally different? You know what I'm saying? So you have to have the plans of Okay, so let's say she's going on a ride, she's only going 20 miles. And for those of you don't ride, you're probably going to trust us 20 miles on a rail trail is nothing. Unless it's like 120 degrees outside, then it starts to be 20 miles, no big deal. But you're not even gonna drink a whole bottle of water. But you're going to take two because you never know. You know, you may taco your wheel and and up and carry the bike out.
Spice:I've ended up writing 15 and walking five,
Salty:it happens. Chain broke. Yeah, your chain broken. unless you happen to have a spare chain you're walking is amazing how I would just not maintain these roads.
Spice:Yeah, we just ran into some snow across the road. So he's
Salty:slightly distracted. Five days after the snow.
Spice:One of the thing, we both have paper and pencil with us. Because we know that if you have a plan to meet somebody and they're not there and you're supposed to go on to the next spot, you want to be able to let them know that you've been there and you've moved on to the next spot. And the ability to leave messages for each other that are not electronic is something a lot of people forget about three things
Salty:that are that are just great to have. And they weigh nothing paper pencil and a small roll of scotch tape. So you take the note up.
Spice:Yeah, all those makeshift things to get notes to attach to things usually fail.
Salty:They tear up the you know, nobody's mad if you use a piece of scotch tape on a on a key surfaces not going to mark nobody cares. But if you start using pins and nails and stuff like that they care a lot so,
Spice:and pencils instead of pens, pens go dry, because you don't need these preps very often. Pens do that. I use mechanical pencils because they don't need sharpening and I like them better. But they don't break very often. And they've got lots of letters in them. So they don't run in when they get wet. Things like that. It's a little stuff but it's we've found a very helpful and we've used it before. So those are things to keep in mind if you're going to be separated from your people.
Salty:We hope you found this useful and enjoyable. And if you did please like the podcast on your whatever pod podcast provider it is you have please recommend it to your friends and subscribe and give us thumbs up stay connected. Five stars is good. Thank you