On my trip to England in 1997, I was enthusiastic about visiting the town of St. Ives in Cornwall. I wanted to walk down the path to the little village just like the man in the Mother Goose riddle my mother had read to my brothers and me so many years ago. I had also read that St. Ives was an artist\u2019 colony. So, as we rattled along the hedge-lined motorway to the northwest coast of Cornwall, I envisioned myself poking around quaint little village shops and tiny art galleries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Nothing could have prepared me for the congested resort town of St. Ives. Rows of grey granite apartment buildings with sober slate roofs sloped down to a wide, boulder-strewn beach, muddy from the recent ebb of the tide. The nursery rhyme riddle hadn\u2019t say anything about a beach! Stiff from the drive and grumpy from the shock, I shouldered my day pack and headed down the hill with the family. This was not<\/em> what I\u2019d expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We bring many things to our travel experiences, some expressed, some hidden deep in our childhoods, schooling, and culture. My vision of the little town where I would meet a man with seven wives, seven sacks, seven cats, and seven kits turned out to be a popular, crowded beach resort with Walls ice cream stands, New Age gem and mineral shops, and loud shuttle buses carrying vacationers back up the steep hills to their tour couches. And I had to look hard for those art galleries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But isn\u2019t this one of the reasons we travel? The unexpected. The new experience. The correcting of misinformation. The dashing of old visions of reality? I thought again about the nursery rhyme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every wife had seven sacks, every sack had seven cats, every cat had seven kits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kits, cat, sacks, and wives, how many were going to St. Ives?<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n How many make a journey anyway? When it comes right down to it, it\u2019s just you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n See also <\/em>\u201cSeaside Resorts\u201d in this collection and YouTube\u2019s \u201cSherpa Channel\u201d with owner Jamie and his beloved Siberian husky Sherpa who wander out and about St. Ives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On my trip to England in 1997, I was enthusiastic about visiting the town of St. Ives in Cornwall. I wanted to walk down the path to the little village just like the man in the Mother Goose riddle my mother had read to my brothers and me so many years ago. I had also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel-writing","category-united-kingdom-and-ireland-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1172"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1200,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1172\/revisions\/1200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}