The Power of Hope – Isles of Scilly: At A Distance (Cornwall Chronicles #27)

The future does not exist without hope. Hope is what keeps us going. It is invaluable to the point of priceless. Give a person hope and they have a chance. Hope opens the heart and mind to future possibilities. Anyone reading this should ask themselves what they hope to accomplish. The answer will act as a source of motivation.

Sound Advice – The Need To Go

I do not have much useful advice for people on how to live their lives. Like most extremely independent people I despise being told what to do. The upshot is that I feel awkward telling others what to do because I imagine that they might react the same stubborn way that I do. This involves giving a perfunctory nod and pretending to listen while doing the exact opposite. The strategy is not without its flaws. A failure to listen often results in bad decisions. Upon reflection, I realize that sound advice was given to me. Unfortunately, I thought that I knew better. This can lead to problems while traveling since I can become too fixated on a self-imposed itinerary.

There are few things that I find worse than setting out on a journey with a goal in mind and failing to achieve it. The fear of failure stalks my every step. Avoiding it keeps me going past the point of common sense. And yet, there is no feeling quite like the pursuit of a long sought after place. As my good friend Brian Walton once said to me with his typically English pragmatism, “the gettington is always better than the havington.” This is of course a twist on “the journey is more important than the destination.” With that in mind, I do have one piece of advice worth giving to travelers or anyone else who might be interested. Always have something to look forward to. In the context of travel this means having a future trip in mind. The future belongs to those who believe in it.

Staying Alive – Many Happy Returns

Even before returning from a trip overseas, I begin planning my next journey. To do otherwise, is to invite depression. It is imperative to my mental well-being that I figure out my next port of call. Since an overwhelming majority of my trips abroad are to Eastern Europe, I begin planning a visit to those places I have yet to reach even though I have spent years thinking about them. Several have been coming to mind lately. Places that have lodged themselves in my semi-consciousness waiting for me to grab hold of a delayed destiny. These places are the lifelines that will pull me across the Atlantic and deep into continental Europe. Among them are Kaunas, Lithuania, Chernivtsi, Ukraine, painted monasteries of the Bukovina region in Romania, Wroclaw and Cieszyn in Poland. I am not surprised that these places have been living somewhere deep inside of me. I have developed sublime affinities for each of them. It is not so much that I want to visit them, as that I need to visit them. They are the equivalent of oxygen; I need them to stay alive.

There is one recent addition to my current crop of future destinations that is an outlier. A place about as far from Eastern Europe as I could get and still be in Europe. My love of the remote, my fetish for the obscure, manifested itself in a barely controlled urge to visit the Isles of Scilly. The Isles are the southernmost place in Great Britain, the most isolated and least populated part of Cornwall. They consist of 145 islands of which a mere five are inhabited by a grand total of 2,271 people. The total land area of the Isles of Scilly is only a bit larger than the city of London. The Isles are little more than an afterthought if anyone thinks of them at all. I imagine their mention is reserved for geography classes filled with British schoolchildren bored out of their minds. Or perhaps they come up in conversation among trivia buffs that like to impress no one other than themselves by reciting peculiar facts aloud.

The Isles of Scilly are not easy to access and can be prohibitively expensive to visit. A vacation on the Mediterranean is cheaper for a Brit than a trip to the Isles. Despite their remoteness, the Isles of Scilly are heavily reliant on tourism. The beaches are pristine and blissfully isolated from the massive crush of tourists on other areas of the coastline in southern Britain. The Isles’ other economic engine is more surprising. They are something of a garden spot. The Isles of Scilly experience the jet stream on steroids. In the summer, the Isles are cooler than the rest of Britain and in the winter they are warmer. The mild climate makes for optimal conditions for growing flowers. It also makes for the kind of eccentric inspiration for a journey that I find intensely seductive.

Imaginary Plans – A Powerful Desire

Seeing really was believing, even if what I saw was a mirage or a figment of an overactive imagination. While visiting Cornwall I spent a day on the Land’s End Coaster, an open-topped bus which covers the Penwith Peninsula, an astonishingly beautiful area known for its rugged stretches of coastline. Not long after leaving Penzance, the Coaster began to wind its way between hedgerows and towards the Atlantic Ocean. In my guidebook, I noticed the Isles of Scilly, which are located 45 miles southwest of the Peninsula. I began looking out over the ocean trying to find them.

I asked a fellow passenger for help. He pointed at an indistinct area of sky, ocean, and cloud cover in the distance. There were the Isles of Scilly or so I wanted to believe. That moment may or may not have been love at first sight. I am not quite sure if I saw the Isles or not. Just the idea of them was enough to fire my imagination. I felt a longing to see them, to stand on them, to be with them. I kept looking, hoping that something more could be seen. A powerful desire came over me. The Isles of Scilly might not have been mine on that day, but I comforted myself with the hope that one day they would be mine.