Originally Posted on 9/23/17
We, as a people, travel and we do it a lot. We travel for work, we take road trips for vacations, and on the holidays we take to the highways to go visit family and friends. Just how much we do travel is evidenced by how many hotels and motels you will find in an urban center, in any given city, in any developed country around around the globe.
By their very nature, road trips dictate a certain amount of preparedness. In many case we are in new settings in unfamiliar territory. So the more we are prepared to rely on ourselves, and the less dependent we are on the world around us, the less time we waste chasing down the things we need and the less risks we take exploring an unfamiliar area at night. As photographer and a writer, being prepared means having several things at my disposal. From portable chargers and rechargeable batteries for my battery powered devices, spare USB cords of various sizes, and memory storage devices on which to transport backups of critical programs if my laptop crashes and I find myself working on one of the hotel computers until morning. It also means having a good knife to meet any cutting needs I may run across.
The first time you see how cold your food can be before room service brings you something to cut a steak with besides butter spreader you realize that when it comes to road trips you are largely on your own. As a general rule, in my personal experience, it takes just as long to get them to come back to your room as it took for them to bring you your food in the first place, and sometimes even longer. In my humble opinion, butter knives make very poor steak knives, so I prefer to have my own sharp knife handy for such times.
It's not something we like to think about, we tend to prefer not acknowledging any potential threats in our lives, but we are not always in a safe area when we travel. We obviously won't always be able to know this from appearances, because you can never judge a book by its cover, so it is something best taken into consideration before hand. In my personal experiences, in traveling for both work and play, “tourists” are often seen as easy targets. I have also found that firearms are not always easy to deploy in close quarters, and common sense says steel boxes in concrete shafts may not be the wisest place to start shooting anyway. In a defensive situation in an elevator a small knife may be much easier to wield, and a few quick penetrations of the lower abdomen has proven pretty effective at taking the fight out of would be attackers.
I may be stating the obvious here for some folks, but another case in point worth mentioning, is in eating leftovers brought back to the room from dinner the night before. The forks in the little packages of utensils given out with to-go boxes work well enough, but the little plastic butter knife isn't going to fare any better versus cold steak than the metal butter knife fared against the hot steak from the other occasion. It just takes one time of attempting using one for this purpose and you will always remember just how annoying it was.
In my life, I have found a good knife to be an indispensable tool in my every day life, so I can't imagine ever not having one on me at any time. Yet I would definitely never travel out of town without certain tools and equipment, and a good quality knife is high up on that list.
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“Flesh runs from steel”. That’s an old Filipino expression. You can probably recall the last time you accidentally cut yourself. We’ve all had it happen to us. When that blade touches your skin, you retract your hand or pull away. Getting cut hurts and we all have a visceral reaction to the idea of it. Compound this idea with thoughts of your kids or kids entrusted to you and your blood pressure and stress levels will skyrocket. You never want to see a child in pain and yet there will come a time when you must teach a child how to use a knife because one day, they’ll need to. This task can be daunting but there are some very easy rules a kid can follow that you are probably already familiar with. When emotions overpower how we think, we can default to a proven method of breaking down safety by looking to another tool kids should know how to use. If you’re familiar with the 4 Rules of Firearms Safety popularized by Jeff Cooper, you’ll appreciate this methodology.
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Brian Griffin
Author
Brian Griffin is an author, photographer, wilderness and survival skills teacher, knife enthusiast, outdoor gear researcher and product development consultant. He has a decades-long history of using and developing outdoor related tools and gear.