Gray Nomad,  gray with an a for active seniors lifestyle.
 
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I have been asked to answer a question about communication system in the event of an emergency and I am diverging out of the traditional home set up, because our home is not traditional, we are on wheels for half of the year like many of our gray with an a for active, nomad, generation.

We could plan for every possibility with hugely expensive set ups but we need to make affordable choices.

When we are at a fixed home base, for half the year, our neighbour has our house key and us, and there is someone we all trust, who has 200 local home keys. This is an ideal country living safety arrangement. In the event of a grass fire across the oat field opposite us, we would know our pet would be taken to safe shelter quickly and our home would be cared for as well as our neighbours home, regardless of if we were home or not.

Now my husband is ill, everyone knows. Recently we were given bags of fresh bread. The vet refused to take payment from me when Indigo got a grass seed in her ear. All because everyone knows how ill my man is and while we never overhear our neighbours or neighbours care about us, and they are not in view of our home, they are all keeping an eye on us making sure we are OK.

This buddy system is not time consuming. We do not meet for coffee, though we could.  Some locals gather together on verandas around 5 pm and we wave to the small happy hour groups of rural neighbours gathering together after work for a drink before heading home for dinner. Happy hour is a common event on a summers evening.

 

We go out and speak to neighbours when we hear a car come along our private rural road. Our road is our, communications system.

Any unusual change in pattern of coming and going or if a dog barks unusually, we go and knock on a neighbours door  and ask if anything is wrong, or we would enter and check. It is a buddy system I have never seen work in the suburbs where perhaps people do depend more on landline telephone. 

Here in the bush, we know that landline telephone lines are something that the cockies might have a chew on, and disrupt, right when you might have been depending on them. We have overlapping buddy systems going so if two buddies were out of action , another buddy would wake up to it and would be here in a shot.

It's not nosey, nor time consuming, we keep to ourselves, don't hang around for coffee, but we would water someone’s garden or mow their lawn if they were away, these things just happen, unspoken.  You cannot buy this sort of country community caring and security in a Telstra store.

Then I have a CB radio and we never travel on roads without having my radio roaming between Channel 18 the caravaner’s news radio and the truckies news, channel 40 so I learn in advance of risks up ahead and can communicate any risk situation we see or emergency we potentially might have. I have not needed to use it for this but it is more useful for fast help than a mobile phone and I have a mobile phone antenna mounted on the car so I have wider coverage along the highways.

That's our security communications security set up, along with solar power and petrol generator and a diesel engine so we have four potential power supply sources to power our communications systems.  These are more secure systems, but that would be looking at enormous cost.

Insurance is not my expertise, I have full insurance on our car and caravan, it gives me peace of mind, and I’m insured through RACV simply because of 50 years of habit and having our 50 years a member gold card discount. http://www.wholesaleinsurance.net  is a web site you can reference for some comparable insurance ideas.
 


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