Put together an emergency getaway bag for your RV if you don’t already have one. Several times we have had to flee our motorhome at a moment’s notice. I am always glad to have read this article on preparing for an emergency here on RVtravel.com.
Emergency documents for your getaway bag
My husband is rather a weather emergency naysayer, so when he says we have to leave I know he means NOW! Being full-timers, I have an expanding folder with all our important paper documents—passports, birth certificates, medical histories, wills, etc. I also have a to-go hard drive with scans of tax documents, credit cards, receipts and all our family photos.
Records—copies are fine, but originals should be stored in a safe deposit box
- Birth certificates
- Passports, driver’s license copy, marriage/divorce records
- Adoption/child custody
- Pet ownership and medical/health info
- Social Security cards
- Photos of family members for identification
- A paper copy of important phone numbers
Financial documents
- Tax records
- Copy of credit cards (both sides)
- List of bills being paid automatically and contact info
- All financial account numbers including asset locations
- Income verification
- Insurance information
- Cash in case ATMs or credit card terminals are down
Property documents
- All vehicle information—titles, VIN #, insurance, and registration
- Real estate—deeds, mortgage
- Inventory—Home and RV: Photos are a good idea. It’s really hard to remember Grandma’s china or the Blackstone grill in an emergency!
Legal documents
- Will
- Living Will
- Power of Attorney
- Trust
Medical
- Medical insurance
- Immunizations
- Medications list and pharmacies
- Critical medical records
Staying connected
We have a small bag ready to add our phone, tablet and computer chargers. Add a spotlight, weather radio, our computer, phones, and tablets and we can stay connected as long as cell towers are up. After reading hundreds of reviews, I just purchased a new weather radio from Amazon.
Medications
All our medicines are already in a plastic shoebox and ready to pull out and take. Some of the medications require refrigeration, so have a small cooler with freezer gel packs also ready to go.
Small bag
Have a small bag ready for a change of clothes and rain gear. Also include jackets and cosmetic travel bags.
Five minutes and out the door with an emergency getaway bag
It is important to have an emergency getaway bag ready. Each time we have left and there are fire, tornado, dangerous winds, or severe thunderstorm warnings, I have been relieved we have everything needed to piece together our lives in the aftermath of a disaster, whether we have our motorhome to go home to or not.
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We need to work on this. We are kinda okay on prep for this, but we could easily be way better. Thanks for the reminder.
Would make a real need in the terrible Maui situation. Small fire proof safe might be a great addition.
Almost all of those items – including family photos- can be scanned and kept on a cloud service (we use Dropbox). A nice advantage of this is that they are all available anywhere you have internet access, even if it is not an emergency.
Wow! That took some work. Great idea, but certainly can’t create ours in a couple of days. Thank you, Nanci!
Great information, time for us to start our own get away kit.
Excellent information to ponder. However, I beg to differ on your assertion that safety deposit boxes are safe. When an emergency happens, you do not know what kind of an emergency it will be? Access to the safety deposit box may not always be available. Better to have a safe, or a safe alternative, for your records that is ALWAYS accessible. I would not trust a bank or similar institution with safety deposit boxes.
Legal documents, wills, trusts the originals are stored with the lawyer. In our case different geographic location. If you buy a fire box read the specs carefully, most will not stand up to a fire that lasts more than 2 hours – essentially useless in the Maui fire or other major fires. Keep all documents both in cloud storage and on a thumb drive in your go bag. Passports are the primary document that are not easy to reproduce quickly and digital copies are not yet useable. We keep ours in specific place in our apt and in our RV.
Did the people with the forced cancelation of their reservation get refunded?