Lighthouse loves

If you have visited my home in the past 5 years you might have stayed in one of our themed rooms. We have the Beach room, Monarch room and our love of lighthouses gave us our favorite aptly named, the" Lighthouse Room". All of our decor centers around lighthouses in this room. Thank you Lisa Redfield for the idea years ago! I can take credit for some of the cool stuff  you will see like the ceramic dresser knobs with lighthouses on them! I can also tell you most of the names of the lighthouses as well and a story or two if you care to sit and listen. My most prized possession is our own local lighthouse painted for me by my father's best friend Roland McNulty. It just says,"I love you" when I look at it. I sat in that room today (my husband likes to take a nap in there) and just looked around at all the memorabilia and took a trip down memory lane. We have traveled to those lighthouses with some of you. It has become such a wonderful "hobby' of ours to visit, view and our tradition is to touch the lighthouse and kiss if possible. I have many kissing pictures taken by strangers and friends. Not exactly sure how we started that habit but it's a good one that causes other visitors to smile and wink at us!  So we recently traveled to Virginia and North Carolina to cross a few major lighthouses off the ole bucket list. Old Cape Henry near Virginia Beach, VA is the oldest lighthouse in the USA. It was commissioned to be built by George Washington in 1792 and still stands AND you can climb it! We also saw the tallest lighthouse in the USA in NC which is the grand daddy of them all, Cape Hatteras Lighthouse! My husbands great great uncle J.B Daniels was a keeper there! We got to see a commemorative stone with his name on it while we were there. Never mind that my husband broke a few park rules to get the photo...See I told you there is always a story I can tell!  They moved that lighthouse about 15 years ago and they call it an engineering feat of the century. Google and read more about it! Anyhow...we convinced our recent traveling companions Roger and Cathy Williams to begin kissing at lighthouses too and they enjoyed climbing them with us. This is really where my story begins. I'm not really sure why I like to climb them. I thought about this a lot as we worked our way to the top of 3 lighthouses.  Here's a few facts for you to ponder that went through my mind. The view is amazing at the top. The wind is usually howling at about 15-30 mph up there on the viewing platform. I have lost a beloved pink Dallas Cowboys cap in the wind at Point Sur  Lighthouse so I know to take off my hat now. The handrails are soooo sticky from everyone using them...ewww. Hand washing is a must afterwards.  I have a torn and now repaired meniscus in my knee from descending a lighthouse on Lake Michigan (Little Sable) ah yes, another great story. I now climb and descend very carefully. I am scared to death when I go out on the open air platform and hug the walls barely able to talk while out there! Taking pictures is a challenge but I press through my fears and as Nike says, "Just do it!". So while visiting Cape Hatteras I stopped to take it allllllll in, calm my fears and realized how thankful I was to be alive and was grateful to be able to climb that historic structure. Many of these beacons of beauty may not survive and be restored so I paused to feel the wind in my face and enjoy the adrenaline rush of climbing a piece of history. Come visit and stay in our room and we can regale you with fun personal stories of our adventures. Maybe the abandoned lighthouse on the Greek island Mykonos we took our friends Jim and Pam Kennedy to! I could tell you about my staying overnight on a rock island for my 50th birthday with friends Mark and Laurie Cameron and Rob and Connie Lee at East Brother Lighthouse near San Francisco! Hopefully the lighthouse in my town, Pacific Grove Point Pinos Lighthouse will light the way for you.