If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m a very cautious person. I don’t like the thought of causing unintentional damage or harming people. And everything in life is risky, which means I spend more than my fair share of time waffling.
One of my current waffles, relevant to my trip next week, is whether to carry an air horn with me.
For me, this is the worst possible decision to have to make. I like the idea of having an air horn for emergencies. If I break down far from a busy road and far from phone connectivity, which doesn’t seem terribly unlikely in a mountainous state where I don’t know the roads, an air horn would be useful. If I have to scare off a black bear, an air horn would be useful (yes, I know, they’re more scared of me, yadda yadda).
Realistically, I’ll probably never need one, but they’re small and light and it would be trivial to keep one around.
However, they’re also flammable. And inflammable (English, man, what a weird language). And keeping an explosive canister in easy reach seems like more of a risk than not having one at all, especially with the “keep out of sunlight” warnings that I can’t comply with in my Jeep.
So my question: has anyone ever been in a situation where one would be particularly useful? The more I type, the easier this decision gets, but what the hell, I wrote all this up so I might as well ask.