16 Unusual Survival Preps to Have in Your Bug Out Bag
By
The Survival Mom
I sometimes roll my eyes at lists of “must-have” preps because they’re pretty much all the same:
Paracord — check
Multitool — check
Flashlight — check
Tell me something different! Something innovative! Something creative that is useful but out of the ordinary!
Well, I took on this challenge myself and scoped out this list of 16 unusual survival preps for your bug out bag, your vehicle emergency kit, or even to stash in your home’s pile of preps. A few of these come from my friends at Survival Frog, a company I support because they offer a 6-month, no questions asked return policy. I use Amazon quite a bit but you never know who you’re really buying from since many sellers can offer the same product. With Survival Frog, I know who to contact if there’s a problem or a question.
With that said, here’s my list of unusual survival preps.
6-in-1 Car Charger
A year or two ago I chauffeured a group of high school kids to their rowing practice. Every time, both to and from, we had to cross over a 1-mile bridge, and I can’t tell you how often I had visions of my car plunging into the water and all 8 or 9 of us fighting to get out. A window-breaking tool was just the thing to give me a little peace of mind! This
6-in-1 car charger is part charger, part window breaker, part seatbelt cutter, and part flashlight! It really does have it all. In fact, it even has a battery pack to keep your phone charged once you’re out of your car.
Get this charger fully charged and then include it in your emergency kit or just keep it in the car as a backup to your usual USB charger.
Extreme Sports Beans
I first learned about these in the book
Locker 9 by Franklin Horton. You can read my review here. A college girl’s father equips a storage locker with everything possible to escape a worst case scenario and get to safety, and one thing he stocks up on are
these Sports Beans loaded with vitamins, electrolytes, and caffeine. I used to give these to my kids right before their races. I can’t claim the beans alone helped them with their speed and endurance, but they were never in last place! I highly recommend adding a few packs of these to your bug out bag and store a few in the glove box as an emergency snack. I put some of these in the ultimate
survival kit I made for my college daughter.
Mylar pouches of water
Depending on where you live and where you’re headed, you may not need to carry much water in your bug out bag. When we lived in Phoenix, getting stranded in the desert was a terrifying prospect, so I made sure we had more then enough water in our vehicle. Now that we live near multiples lakes and rivers, I know the water is there. However, for a bug out bag,
these heavy-duty mylar bags filled with water are an asset. You can be confident that you have enough water to get through a day, for example, and the mylar bags themselves are very useful on their own once empty. Flimsy plastic water bottles puncture and crack easily, while these pouches are far sturdier.
Knee-high galoshes
It wasn’t until we had to wade through Hurricane Harvey floodwater that I realized how valuable a pair of these rubber galoshes can be. Waterproof, heavy-duty, and large enough to fit over most shoes and boots, it’s worth picking up a pair. I bought ours at a local ACE Hardware Store. To be fair, these won’t fit in a bug out bag, but if you expected to encounter high levels of water, they could be attached to the outside of your bag with a carabiner. They really are worth the money but do check for the thickest rubber galoshes you can find and close to knee-high. Some are simply fun rainboots and don’t provide the same protection. These galoshes, sometimes called overshoes, are not fashionable, but that’s not our priority here, is it?
Shoe Goo
Along with those galoshes, I have to recommend
a tube of Shoe Goo. Some time ago I posted an article about
taking care of your feet. In any type of emergency, without your feet in good condition, you’re a sitting duck. If you can’t walk, hike, run, or skip to safety, you’ll have to find someone to carry you! Part of taking care of your feet is taking care of your shoes. Shoe Goo is an adhesive designed to seal your shoes to make them waterproof and/or seal holes or seams in a shoe or afix the sole to the upper portion. It’s a very handy product and worth having in each emergency kit or bug out bag. If your shoes fall apart, you ain’t goin’ nowhere.
Tactical pen
As I’m sure you know, in many parts of the country and around the world, a self-defense weapon of any kind is outlawed. Protect yourself from an attacker by using even a Swiss Army knife, and you could be the one going to jail. A multi-purpose item like
this tactical pen can be used as an innocent ink pen, and a good quality one at that, but is also heavy-duty enough to use to strike an attacker. There are many videos on YouTube, like this one, that demonstrate how to put a tactical pen to use against an assailant. Every bug out bag and emergency kit needs at least 1 or 2 writing implements, so you might as well have something like this that can double as a small, silent weapon.
Safety Siphon Hose
Siphoning gas from someone else’s car simply isn’t a subject for polite company. However, get a group of preppers together, someone brings up
One Second After, and all of a sudden it seems totally appropriate to start discussing ways to siphon gas! I recommend getting one of these
Safety Siphon Hoses to use for gasoline and a second one to use for water if you have it stored in large barrels or other big containers. This hose is self-siphoning! There’s no need to get the siphoning action going the old-fashioned way by sucking on a hose and ending up with a mouthful of gasoline. I saw my dad do that when I was a kid and never wanted to try it myself! With this hose, just make sure the container of liquid you are siphoning from is at a higher elevation than the container you are siphoning it to. Give the little copper pump on the end a few jiggles and the liquid will begin moving up the hose and then down into your storage container. Much, much better than the old suck-on-the-hose-and-get-a-mouthful-of-gasoline method!
