When Bibliophiles Go Full-Time in an RV
Deciding to go full-time in an RV or 5th Wheel is a serious decision. Many people look for the affordability of not being tied down to one location, while others, taking advantage of today’s gig/freelance economy cut ties and live full-time in an RV. Clearly, downsizing when adapting to this lifestyle is a significant issue. Many people love the idea and embrace simplicity easily. As our residents at Imperial Trailer Village, a leading trailer park in Los Angeles can affirm, every single spare inch of storage space in an RV or trailer needs to be used efficiently.
So, what do you do when your family has been collecting books for decades and you and your spouse are one step away from an intervention and referral to “Bibliophiles Anonymous?”
What to do with our books was the one thing that we couldn’t decide upon when we were planning to go full time in our RV. Literally thousands of books lined our bookshelves. Remember Beast’s library gift to Belle in Walt Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast?” Yeah, it was about like that.
Anyone want a book – or 1,000+?
We truly were in a quandary about what to do about our books. In our final wishes, we designated sections (organized by topic) of our collection to each of our children, based on their reading preferences. You can take that to mean that, yes; our books were all so organized, thanks to my husband growing up with a librarian mother.
When it came down to it, we decided that doing a “Swedish Death Cleaning” was the way to go. We summoned our friends and family, told them that they needed to clear space in their homes, and boxed up the books. There was some crying and wailing as we said goodbye to our hard backed friends, but we survived.
Bibliophiles meet technology
One of our children, we’ll say it here without mentioning his name (Justin), who’s always been our resourceful one, gave us each a 10” tablet from a certain company named after a large river – Nile. Nope the other one. We loaded our favorites onto these tablets and were able to add digital copies of our favorite books. While we’ve always been fans of audio books, this took some getting used to. To ease the transition that same son, who is now our favorite (just kidding – sort of), gave us several candles that smell of old books. He picked them up at that “river” store and they are delightful!
Now that we’re happily installed at our home-away-from-home Los Angeles trailer park, Imperial Trailer Village, whenever we get a hankering for books, the Inglewood Public Library is about 5 minutes away and we just go hang out in the stacks.
