I'm not sure if this has been discussed before - I didn't find anything from my initial search - but I thought I would share some observations from my experience of moving my family cross-country this past summer. I'm in the military, so I'll caveat this by pointing out that I'm very fortunate that the government (and all you tax payers out there) take care of my family and me by packing up and moving our household goods, but it was still not without a few headaches.

I'm not the most serious prepper, but around the time of Hurricane Sandy, I started making more of an effort to store food, water, and other supplies in case of such an emergency (Sandy fortunately passed us by with just a couple days of heavy rain). Stockpiling some of these items led to a few challenges when it came time to move, and I'm curious how others may have handled such a move when it comes to your family's emergency supplies.

The easiest one for me was water. I bought six 5-gallon military water cans a while back, which I keep filled with water for the purposes of hygiene and cooking. When faced with something like an impending hurricane, I fill up the bath tubs and place water cans in the bathrooms for washing and flushing the toilets in the event the water supply is cut off. I also stockpiled cases of water (amazing how cheap bottled water is at places like Costco) for drinking. As our move approached, we simply began using the bottled water, leaving three cases to take with us on our cross-country drive. A week or so before the movers showed up, I emptied the water cans and left them open to dry out. Depleting our water supply for a month or so prior to our move seemed like a reasonable risk to make the pack-up easier. In the end, we gave away a couple cases of water to some friends when we didn't get through all of them.

Food is probably the area where I need to get more organized. I had a number of canned goods, some of which we donated, and others we had the movers pack up (but that adds weight to your household goods shipment pretty quickly). I also store dry goods such as rice and beans in 5-gallon buckets with Gamma lids. I don't have as many of these as I should, but that worked out in my favor, since the movers were able to just pack them up and ship them for us (they will ship any packaged food that is still sealed). The one unpleasant thing I discovered after arriving at our new home was that one of these buckets, contained a large sack of rice, was infested with tiny ants. I'm pretty sure that the Gamma seal was tight (it's supposed to be airtight when installed on a 5-gallon bucket), so I can only assume that the bag was already infested when I bought it at the store. The rice had been stored in the bucket for at least 3 or 4 years. Maybe someone out there can comment on whether that makes sense (I may start a separate discussion about this issue).

Our household goods shipment ended up almost exactly at our weight limit. That's an uncomfortable feeling because of the possibility of having to pay out of pocket for the additional weight. That makes me hesitant to add additional supplies to my stash that could push us over the limit on our next move. With growing kids, I can only assume that we're going to acquire more "stuff," so I'm actively working to thin down our possessions to give us a buffer in our weight the next time around.

The biggest issue I dealt with during the move was ammunition, which I mention separately because it can't be shipped by the movers. I had several thousands rounds of rifle and pistol ammo saved up, and I had also bought a 1,200 round case of 5.56 that I intended to use for a class that never materialized. With work and family obligations over the past few years, I wasn't getting many opportunities to shoot, but I was continuing to buy ammo when things were on sale, anticipating another "panic" in the future. Ammo is bulky (in quantity) and heavy, and it was not fun to have to carry all of it cross-country in our cars. Upon arriving in our new town, we couldn't store it in a storage unit (against the rules just about everywhere), and didn't want to drive around with it in the car for several weeks while we found a place to live. If you don't have a friend or family members in the area, there aren't many options for temporarily storing a large quantity of ammo.

A military friend of mine has a small open trailer that he uses for every move, in which he builds a plywood box / enclosure that he seals with screws and silicon caulk. He uses this trailer to transport all the things that he can't or doesn't want to ship with the movers. He leaves it sealed until he moves into his new home. Theoretically, someone could break into it, but it would probably take a lot of work and would make a lot of noise. Seems like a good idea, but I wasn't that organized for this last move.

Hopefully this experience will be useful to others who may be facing a move in the future. I'm interested to hear from anyone else who has gone through this kind of experience, and how you planned for and executed it.

Dave