Post date: Oct 17, 2017 4:28:04 PM
A number of people have asked us what we took with us in our bags when we took a load of things out of Napa during the recent fires. It was an interesting, if somewhat anxious, experience. And with time to think about it, we might have done something differently. But we began with deciding that we would put everything in our van. The van is now our backpacking/camping mobile, and it would give us a place to live if everything went completely to hell. And in that van we also put all of our backpacking equipment, because it was almost ready to go anyway, and it would give us everything we would need to live for a few days, or even a few weeks, except for food: first aid kit, water filter, sleeping bag, clothes, raingear, etc. And the van even had 3 gallons of drinkng water, just in case.
What else? Photos. We took every darnn photo we could find. We didn't stop to decide which one was best. We generally kept all of our photos in boxes in one room of the house,. and I just grabbed every single box and album, and put it in the van.
Financial stuff: M collected the latest statements from our accounts etc. and put them all into one folder, so we would be able to track it all down later if we needed to do that. And our passports, since they are a real pain to replace, and would serve and foolproof I.D.
And then M grabbed most of her knives. As a chef, that's the one thing she didn't want to try to replace. I took my computer, because despite my occasional efforts at backup, I didn't want to have to try to find or recreate those files again. No thanks. And of course our phones, for obvious reasons.
M took a family heirloom afghan, as well as her most treasured jewelry. A few bottles of her homemade nocino liqueur. All of that pretty much fit into one large box, except for the afghan. And I took most of my recent watercolor paintings. Yeah, I had photos of them, but photos wouldn't look all that good on the wall...
What didn't we take? Almost everything else. We looked at this and that, and decided that we had enough. And that we could replace the other stuff if we had to. The Christmas decorations and kids artwork in the attic got left behind, as did the artwork on the walls, mainly because we didn't want to take it all, and we didn't have time to select what we really loved. Sometime when we have a day, that would be a good exercise for us...
Most of all, we took each other.