Review of Ron Hood’s Urban Master DVD “Away From Home”

As many of you know, I do a lot of trav­el­ing for work.  In fact, one of my con­cerns is always secu­ri­ty and pos­si­ble SHTF when I trav­el.  I don’t think there can be a much worse sit­u­a­tion than being with­out any of the gear you are famil­iar with than when the SHTF and you are left with­out to make due.  This is much of the rea­son I start­ed trav­el­ing with a small trav­el EDC kit.  And, it is part of the rea­son why I picked up this CD from Ron Hood’s site.  That said, as I write this, I popped in the DVD, and am look­ing for­ward to review­ing it quick­ly after­ward.

• This DVD was not specif­i­cal­ly made for peo­ple who trav­el a lot or have built a trav­el kit already.  It seems it was designed for the per­son that has not giv­en much thought to trav­el secu­ri­ty.
• The first sequence of the DVD deals with hotel safe­ty and evac­u­a­tion.  Admit­ted­ly, I do not always look for the evac­u­a­tion plan of the hotel, since I stay in the same hotel time after time.  This is good advice from Ron.  How­ev­er most peo­ple I know, includ­ing myself, will get to the hotel and sigh­ing in relief that they even got there after a full day of trav­el.  The last thing I want to do is think about safe­ty, but it is the first thing I should be think­ing about.
• Much of the first sec­tion was ded­i­cat­ed to the poten­tial dis­as­ters of the hotel.  One quick tip that made sense is that you should request a low­er room giv­ing you bet­ter faster access to the street and park­ing lot.
• Not unlike myself, Ron car­ries a EDC type of kit, but he has sev­er­al items I do not.
  • Rapelling belt
  • 40+ feet of rope for rap­pelling
  • Carib­in­er
  • Evac­u­a­tion Mask for a bio­log­i­cal or chem­i­cal issue made of a fire resis­tant mate­r­i­al.  His cov­ers his whole head so he has his eyes pro­tect­ed as well. (I may pick one of these up, it looks like a smart addi­tion to the EDC kit).
• He also car­ries sev­er­al com­mon sense items to alert him of a secu­ri­ty breach for the room, while there or not.
• He car­ries a wire­less bug/camera detec­tor for detec­tion of wire­less cam­eras, etc. in a room.  Seems pret­ty handy, as I don’t give this much thought, as much as I trav­el.  He also gives some advice on how to find cam­eras that might be hid­den in your hotel room.  He dis­cuss­es voyeurism and how  it secret­ly vio­lates pri­va­cy.  Again, an area that I do not give much thought to.  I will now.  Weird?
• He goes into health pre­cau­tions because when he went to Roma­nia, they had the avian flu.  I think that health pre­cau­tions should be tak­en any­way since air­planes are tin cans full of germs.  Ron goes into what he does to help pre­vent air­borne and con­tact germs from attack­ing him and mak­ing him ill while on a trip.
• One area I was par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in was the sec­tion of the video where Ron spoke about Emer­gency Gear.  He called it Chameleon Gear.  He defines Chameleon Gear, as gear that can be used or worn in plain sight that does not look like it’s intend­ed pur­pose.  It seems that he packs much of the EDC gear he is going to trav­el with goes on the plane with him inside a jack­et designed with a sys­tem for car­ry­ing a dis­trib­uted load of gear more even­ly.  He did pull a knife out of the jack­et, so I am mak­ing an assump­tion that he checks that with his lug­gage (assum­ing he is going by plane) today when he trav­els, as I do.  Much of Ron’s Trav­el EDC gear is like mine  with the excep­tion of a few items.  He car­ries a small AM/FM radio, and I do not.
• Ron’s wife Karen also dis­cuss­es a few items around per­son­al secu­ri­ty for your lug­gage and chil­dren.   She also dis­cuss­es gen­er­al per­son­al secu­ri­ty while going about your day to day busi­ness when out and about for the day.

Ron went into some filler with MREs and Bug Out Bags as well.  He went into some detail about what will go into the BoB, stat­ing that its con­tents will be based on where you live and your envi­ron­ment.

Like with the first DVD, I think that if you are a begin­ner or urg­ing friends or fam­i­ly to begin think­ing about  this video would be worth it.  If you are a sea­soned trav­el­er, sea­soned prep­per, or both, I am not sure you haven’t thought about much of this before.  I did pick up a few nuggets of infor­ma­tion, and that made the 15.95 price tag worth it to me.  And at about three nuggets of infor­ma­tion, the ROI was 5.00 per nugget.  Not a bad invest­ment.