Southcentral Pennsylvania native writes about her world travels
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Scott LaMar
Airdate: January 19, 2023
Traveling the world is only a dream for most of us. Few get to realize that dream firsthand and then we maybe read about or watch documentaries of far off, exotic places.
Sherry Knowlton is a native of Chambersburg and she got to live her dream of traveling. She has visited more than 50 countries on six continents.
Ms. Knowlton has written about her adventures in two of the books she has written – Beyond The Sunset – A Travel Memoir Volumes One and Two.
Sherry Knowlton was on The Spark Thursday and described her first long trip across the country with her soon-be-husband, Mike,”We decided that after graduation, my graduation, what we’d do was set off to see America, You know, sort of like that Simon and Garfunkel song. And he had a van. So we figured it out with a bed and, you know, a cooler and some stuff like that, and did a huge circle around the country going north to Maine and to Canada, across to the west, to the West coast, down the West Coast, and then to the Grand Canyon, and had a wonderful time. We did run out of money in Wyoming, so we spent a month in Wyoming, working. I was a waitress in a cowboy bar, 24 hour cowboy bar, and my husband with his long hair wash dishes and got a lot of guff from all the cowboys. After Wyoming gone on to the Grand Canyon, our van broke down on coming from the desert at night and basically the engine was fried. So we got a tow back to a city. We bought a car, sort of cobbled together enough money from being wired some and a credit card that we had to buy a Javelin, which is one of those old muscle cars, loaded two dogs into the car and everything else we could salvage and headed back home to Pennsylvania. We seriously had $0.32 in our pocket by the time we reached home. But we were hooked on travel from there.”
After their cross-country trip, the Knowltons traveled the world. Knowlton was asked if she had a favorite destination,”It’s hard to really say a favorite, but I really would have to say that it’s Africa, meaning African safaris. My husband, Mike and I have been now on seven safaris to Africa, two different countries there, and actually have a big return trip to southern Africa planned for this July. So, you know, there’s tons of places Tuscany, Provence, you know, South East Asia that I love. I have loved to visit — New Zealand’s astounding. But Africa just keeps bringing us beckoning us back again and again. I think we love the animals. And I think just the whole experience of being out in the wild, very remote. And we try to go as remote as possible. And the routine of being on safari is, to me, an ideal vacation because it takes you out of the, you know, your typical day to day life. And, you know, you get into a routine, you’re out with the animals, you rise with the sun, you go to bed when the sun sets and you just see all sorts of exciting things and you get Inland Rovers and rocket over the the plains to find animals that when somebody calls a guide and says, Oh, we’ve just spotted a leopard here. I mean, it’s just an exciting, fun thing to do.”
