Yesterday Geoff and I went to Point Reyes and saw the lighthouse there, because randomly taking a day trip to experience the local touristy fauna is the sort of thing you can do when you don’t have a regular nine-to-five job.

There are 308 steps leading down to the lighthouse. Walking down was not a problem, but walking back up was a bit of a workout—especially with the strong winds! (It’s common for the winds to blow at 40mph or higher, but I don’t think they were quite that high yesterday or the stairs to the lighthouse would have been closed. The ranger there told us they had to close the stairs the day before.)

The lighthouse has been retired since 1975 (replaced by a smaller, automated light) but the mechanisms inside have been preserved and we were able to go into the lens room to see. The lens is made up of prisms that bend the light in a specific and unique pattern so sailors could use the light not only to tell how close they were to shore, but also to orient themselves in the ocean.

Speaking of lighthouses, over the summer I started building Greenleaf’s new laser-cut lighthouse kit in half scale. I worked on it for a few days and it was going together pretty quickly, but then I got distracted and put it aside. (Story of my life.) Now that I’ve seen an actual lighthouse I might be inspired to go back to it. But not really being into the mechanical side of it, I would want to decorate the inside of my mini lighthouse like an actual house…