How to access NuGet when NuGet.org is down (or you're on a plane)

I was in Dallas today speaking at the Dallas Day of .NET. During my keynote presentation - it included lots of NuGet demos - and for some reason the NuGet.org site was down at that exact moment. I ended up coming up in the middle somewhere. I'm not in Redmond so I don't know what happened and I won't speak for the team. However, my initial reaction was "I'm screwed" and the crowd was interested in how I was going to continue. We all depend on NuGet (the system) and NuGet.org (the server). I know that the team is aiming for "5 nines" availability with the NuGet.org site and that it runs in Azure now. I assume they'll put an explanation of the issue up on the site soon.

Regardless, you might think I was stuck. Well, remember that NuGet caches the packages it downloads on your local hard drive. My cache was located at C:\Users\scottha\AppData\Local\NuGet\Cache.

You can add that cache folder as a NuGet Source by going to Options | Package Manager | Package Sources. You can see I added it in my dialog below.

Then later, when I'm using NuGet offline I can select my cache if need be. Again, I should never need to, but you get the idea:

If you're concerned about external dependencies on a company-wide scale, you might want to have a network share (perhaps on a shared builder server) within your organization that contains the NuGet packages that you rely on. This is a useful thing if you are in a low-bandwidth situation as an organization.

If you think a feature that makes offline a more formal state is useful, please go vote up this "offline" issue on NuGet's CodePlex site and join the conversation with ideas on how you think "NuGet on an airplane" or "low/no bandwidth NuGet" should work. For example, should it automatically fall back? Should there be a timeout? Should there by an -offline explicit option? Should the existing Offline Cache be added automatically?