How Many Books Are Too Many to Bring on Vacation?

This stack represents most of the books I accumulated on a recent two-week driving tour of Northern California. Because I could fill my big suitcase with as much weight as I wanted, I packed books, writing materials, and a laptop in the same compartment as my clothes. It was so heavy I couldn’t lift it myself. At times I hoisted the back end of the rolling suitcase, and my husband took the front, but most of the time, he moved all of it.

We roamed Napa, El Dorado, Mendocino, and Humboldt counties, tossing open the doors of local bookstores and purchasing even more books to stuff into our luggage. A little voice in my head questioned whether buying more books was wise. I’m on vacation, I replied. I permitted myself to buy as many books as I wanted. 

The original intention was to blend novel writing and recreational reading time with exploring the places we visited. During the trip, I opened my laptop to write zero times. I spent one warm afternoon reading magazine articles from 1912 to further my novel research. But mostly, instead of focusing on the materials from home, I spent several hours reading books detailing the places we discovered during the day.

For example, our stay in El Dorado was plagued by over one hundred-degree temperatures. After ditching the searing heat for a cool, damp half hour underground inside Placerville’s 1880s Gold Bug mine, we went to see where the gold rush started, Sutter’s Mill inside Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park.

The main drag of historic ruins and replica mining town buildings was quiet under the sun’s white blaze. We made a beeline for the air-conditioned mercantile store, where I picked up “The Gold Discovery: James Marshall and the California Gold Rush.”

The book was the perfect substitute for poking around the oven-hot park. I then gathered up the book, “Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens,” figuring it would be a fun way to learn about our country’s food traditions. And I left the mercantile with a bag of root beer sanded drops—an old-timey sweet impulse buy.

So that’s how my collection of reading material grew over my vacation. I’m worried about what I’ll do the next time I pack for an airplane flight.

Should I take just one book and buy books during my travels?

But what if I buy too many books?

Help…