Almost Bookcation

Once upon a time, my wife and I would go on yearly bookcations. We’d leave the kids with someone random (usually someone we trusted and not truly someone random). We’d book a B&B for a couple nights. We’d pillage used book stores. We’d return home with a box of books which would take us the year to get through.

Oh, the delights of those days! We discovered so many wonderful worlds! We uncovered countless delights! It was a lot of fun. We’d purposely go all day not looking at what each other selected. In the evening after supper, we’d slowly go through our purchases, exclaim about how these all looked really great, and savor each other’s company. We had favorite bookstores near the B&B, eating establishments with a lot of memories, and we even knew the innkeepers of that B&B.

And then we moved.

Our new location is too far removed to go back to that old B&B, at least at the age our kids are. We want to get away, but we still need to be close enough to scurry back home if something comes up.

To be clear, we love where we are now. The congregation I serve as a pastor is a group of people I rejoice to serve. Our neighborhood is awesome. The kids’ schools are solid.

The problem: We were now far from our babysitters. Since we have an insanity of children – A group of children is called an insanity. Trust me. – well, it’s hard to find someone to watch four children of various and sordid ages. It’s taken a few years to build up relationships that allow us to leave the kids behind. But now, the relationships have been built up. We’re splitting the kids up.

And now the plan is… hopefully… maybe… to finally go on another bookcation.

Maybe.

So, assuming we get to leave town, we’ve found a B&B near a city that supposedly has a bunch of good bookstores. Next week I’ll write up our bookcation, assuming we get to go. But… even if we get to the B&B, we may not even be able to indulge in a book shopping extravaganza.

Stupid Covid.

We’ve pretty much decided that worse comes to worse, we can just hang out in our room at the B&B and read books all day, kid-free. That’s pretty much paradise anyway, right? Sitting beside a loved one, enjoying stories together?

And it’s not like we don’t have a bunch of books here we haven’t read yet. Geez, so many books we haven’t read yet! Particularly once we moved here, we ended up just loading up on books whenever there was a good sale since we weren’t doing bookcations anymore. The end result was a lot more books, actually.

In an unrelated note, we desperately need to find room for more shelving in the house.

But we’ve turned shopping for books into a relationship-building special time. My wife and I are looking forward to these days.

Do you have any fun processes for finding new books? Any favorite bookstores? Any relationships that get to built up with reading or reading-related activities?