Well, I guess as the youngest (known active) member of our forums, I have the shortest story. But I’ve packed a lot into it.
I came into this world at 9:33 AM on 28 January 1990, at a hospital in Summit, NJ. I’ve lived in the same house in central Jersey my entire life with my parents and younger brother. Our town is a bit “cosmopolitan-suburban,” but beneath the Starbucks-wielding highlighted women, it’s a nice place. I went to the local high school, and am currently in my freshman year at Fordham University.
My lighthousing started on 5 August 1999. My grandparents were celebrating their 45th anniversary and 70th birthdays at The Cloister in Sea Island, GA, and our entire family went there to celebrate for a few days. I was a hyper little 9-year-old, and pretty soon I’d driven everybody up the wall with my antics. In a last-ditch effort, my mom got the valet to bring us my aunt’s big white Suburban (which six of us had taken from Atlanta to Sea Island), and headed over to St. Simon’s Island to see the lighthouse.
I remember that day pretty well, considering it was a decade ago. I remember climbing the tower; touring the museum; walking around the grounds. I remember thinking that “second order Fresnel lens” meant the second one requested from the factory. But the most important part of this visit, like so many, was the gift shop.
There, I purchased a 1000-piece puzzle of about eighty American lighthouses. I was amazed. I’d be cognizant of the existence of other lighthouses, but I never thought there were that many. I set a goal: to visit all eighty of these lighthouses before I died.
A few weeks later, I went to my grandparents’ beach house in Spring Lake, NJ. We visited Navesink and Sandy Hook lights one day. Then we went to the Sea Girt Lighthouse one town away. Immediately, I fell in love with the building. The attached tower, exposed brick, and beautiful porch formed what became quickly my favourite lighthouse. Today, it’s my moniker across the lighthouse world, as well as a good part of the rest of the Internet.
From there, things skyrocketed. By the end of 1999, I’d visited all the Atlantic coast lights of New Jersey. In the summer of 2000, we visited the Outer Banks for the first time, and toured from Currituck to Ocracoke. Since then, I’ve spent about six months combined of my life on the gorgeous sandy strip of North Carolina.
The next years brought family lighthousing vacations. We did the first New Jersey Lighthouse Challenge in October 2000 – actually called “New Jersey Lighthouse 2000.” Easter 2001 took us to the main Chesapeake lights. In October 2002, my dad and I did the New Jersey challenge again in his BMW 2002tii.
On 23 December 2002, I joined these Collector Forums with my first post: a suggestion in the 2002 NJ Challenge wrap up thread for a group bus trip. I’d find it, but I have a self-conscious aversion to reading my own posts more than a few months old.
In June 2003, I joined the New Jersey Lighthouse Society, and attended my first meeting at Stony Point, NY. Many people in the lighthouse community still remember meeting me for the first time there, five years ago.
Then, things got serious. In August 2003, I did my first large-scale lighthouse trip, a 3-day, 44-light jaunt from Stamford, CT to Nobska, MA. I was hooked on “hardcore lighthousing” and fell in love with New England. In April 2004, I went with my dad along the Seaway Trail in New York for three days, an excursion of beautiful lights and rolling farmland. In November 2004, we finished off Massachusetts with a 2-day journey from Cape Cod to Cape Ann.
In 2004, we started a tradition of taking an annual “men’s gathering” sailing trip on my dad’s friend Moe’s 30 foot sailboat. Based out of the Hamptons, that first cruise took me to most of the lights of eastern Long Island Sound.
2004 was also the year I did my first event with the New England Lighthouse Lovers, the Hot Chocolate event in the Mystic, CT area. My mom and I had a ton of fun, freezing with other lighthouse enthusiasts. I grew to love group lighthousing, but I was limited to where my parents wanted to go, being but 14.
2005 took me to Block Island, 2006 to the lower latitudes of the Great Lakes on a return from a roadtrip to Colorado. I remember walking down Navy Pier to see Chicago Pierhead, my first pierhead light at Michigan City, and my first Michigan light at St. Joseph’s.
In 2007, I got two very important things. The first was my driver’s license, my passport to solo lighthousing. The second was my trusty 1993 Range Rover County LWB, “Spen.” Spen succeeded our first Land Rover, a 1994 Discovery, which carried me on most of my early lighthouse journeys. After being totaled by a tree branch in 2005, hopes for a future with me were lost. Instead, the Range Rover and I have gone many miles together the past few years in the pursuit of lighthouses, and though the paint is faded, the leather is a bit worn, and the electrics are funky, we always make it home and have a good time.
In 2007, I did my first overnight trip alone, the NELL fall meeting cruise up the Hudson. I decided to get a spot first and ask my parents later, namely when I needed their credit card to book my hotel. I immediately fell back into the NELL family, and I’ve gone to all but one meeting since.
I turned 18 in 2008, so to celebrate I went to Staten Island. (As a borough of New York, you can’t drive there until you’re 18.) And from there, the solo lighthousing took off. I did the Long Island Lighthouse Challenge in May, taking the Rover and I across all of “The Island” in one whirlwind 18-hour day. I then did a three-day trip to Cape Cod and the Islands, doing the Vineyard and Nantucket by bike to save ferry costs. In July and August, my mom, brother and I toured California, and I added a third coast to my record.
Odds and ends in the last few months have taken me to lights in Montreal and the Bahamas. No matter where I go, I seek out the lights. As of 24 February 2009, I’ve seen 225 lighthouses in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Mexico, and the Bahamas. And I’m not stopping.
In three weeks, I’m loading the Rangey back up and heading for a week in Maine. In all this lighthousing, I have not touched the “Holy Land.” And in May, I’m going to see lights in England and the Isle of Man before coming home on the Queen Mary 2.
From there? Who knows. Give me a map and a camera, and I’m off. I still have some of those eighty lights on that puzzle to see.
