Here’s the sitch. Without warning, your husband/wife/significant other comes home in the most agitated mood you’ve ever seen them. Looking both deadly serious and terribly frightened, your partner says you need to stop whatever you’re doing and leave with them that instant. There’s no time to pack, no time to make any phone calls; you just need to put on your shoes, grab your wallet, and kids if you have any, and get the hell out of Dodge. There’s no telling when you’re return, or even if you’ll ever be able to. Why? Your family (meaning you, your partner, and your kids) is in immediate mortal danger. Details will take longer than you have time for right now; they’ll explain when you’re on the road.
Same as Olives. No kids, but I do have to stop and grab my meds - but that means that I also have my backup hard drive because my 3 month supply of meds is kept in the bailout bag with my passport, certain papers and my backup hard drive.
Not paranoid, but I did live in a hurricane zone, and he grew up in a wildfire/earthquake area.
I was specifically thinking of you when I wrote the poll. I almost named an option after you, and that’s no joke.
Does it matter if there’s no apparent danger? Hurricanes and wildfires come with plenty of warning (though of course earthquakes do not). If I’d thought ahead I would have stipulated in the OP that you had no idea why your spouse was so agitated, but it’s too late now.
BTW - my parents actually had something similar to this scenario set up when I was a kid. My father is retired Air Force now, but when I was younger during the cold war, he spent a lot of time on alert in the missile silos in the various states we lived. They had a plan that if he was ever on alert and called my mother and said, “go put gas in the station wagon,” that meant mom had to load the kids up, and start heading north. Not that we would’ve had anywhere safe to go really.
My wife is a bit on the prone to panic side, so I wouldn’t necessarily want all the details, just a category at least before I grab my cash, keys, and wallet and get out.
My SO would be dead or left behind or both if I was the one bursting in because she would fracking HAVE to have a five minute explaination of why first. We’ve had minor versions of “you need to do this now” where she wouldn’t till I explained it to her (typically minor car/computer/household emergency/DIY kinda stuff).
She’s fucked. And I’m most likely on the lamb and single again.
The reference to being single made me think he meant “lambskin.”
Anyway, my wife is not prone to panic. If she said this, you bet I’d be out the door. It’s a versin of Pascal’s equation: if I leave with her, and I didn’t need to, then I’ve lost maybe an hour of my life as I figure out it was unnecessary and turn around. If I don’t leave with her and I needed to, game over, man, game over.
I can’t imagine such a scenario happening. So if it did, I wouldn’t waste time asking questions; I’d grab my keys and go. There will be plenty of time for explanations while we’re in the car. And if it turns out to be not quite so dire a situation as feared…hey, at least we had a Road Trip!
Think of the children!