Chatham light — and then back not only to the Highland light in North Truro, where it all began, but closer to P-town’s 3 lights, from the water!

Yesterday I got started in the early afternoon and drove the entire length of the forearm of Cape Cod, from North Truro down Route 6 to Route 28, right down to the very elbow of the Cape. It took just over an hour. When I was a child, Chatham was where we first went to stay, in these little salt box cottages near the sea, Ryder’s cottages I think they were called. They had wonderful homemade clam chowder fetes for all the residents every few weeks. I remember Chatham being bare, sandy, small pine trees, large ponds, not many people. This place is transformed and I bet it’s the place with the most money on the whole of the Cape. Lovely, large houses, lush lawns,  flowers everywhere, beautiful landscaping with trees, views over the water, sand bars full of birds and the ponds covered in gorgeous, expensive boats. Wow.  The whole of Route 28 was nothing but one lovely house after the other.

I made it to the lighthouse, which was in the middle of a lawn, open to the public, across the road from a carpark that couldn’t keep up with the long line of traffic coming in just to stop there. There was a queue to get into the lighthouse too. I hung around hoping for a space for about ten minutes and gave up. I wanted to get to back to Truro to the beach! Took a photo of the light, and went back the way I’d come, promising myself to return in the off season next time I’m here. Here’s how it looks:

 

I stopped in a larger carpark about five minutes drive up the Shore Road, and watched a fishing boat offloading fish for sale in a nearby fresh fish shop.  There were even two seals hanging about in the water with all the gulls waiting for a treat.  Here’s the boat and the seal:

And I almost forgot — I also wanted to get to the Highland light in North Truro, the lighthouse that started this whole project to photograph lighthouses. I wanted to see if it had changed! It hadn’t, but it was really in need of a new coat of paint. You can see the photo I took of it last year in my first post of this series, which I used in a small exhibition I did of Provincetown photos from November 2010 in February 2011. Here is a photo of the back of the lighthouse, close up:

And then I went to the beach at Corn Hill and had a lovely relaxing couple of hours and a swim and then went to watch the sunset, but wait! I’m leaving that for last… The day I wrote this, 28 July, I thought it was the end of the lighthouse saga, at least on Cape Cod. And it was, until I went whale watching two days later…

Yes, whale watching, where, in addition to almost seeing at least 15 whales, I got rather sick from the fumes of the engine and threw up for the first time in almost 40 years! But the best part was, as the boat left the harbour, Ros pointed in the distance and said: “It looks as if you’re going to see both your other lighthouses.” She meant the Wood End light and Long light, the ones I hadn’t managed to get close enough to for a good photo, let alone to explore, on that narrow strip of sand at the very tip of the Cape. And so it was. So here they are, taken from the whale-watching boat, first Wood End and then Long light all by its lonesome:

And that really is the end of this first series of my photos. It’s time for the sun to go down, and where better to watch it than from Herring Cove beach. And if you look closely in this last photo, you can even see the Race Point lighthouse in the distance, bringing me and the three Provincetown lighthouses together before I leave for home:

I hope you’ve enjoyed these photos. I certainly enjoyed taking them!!              31 July 2011.

The Provincetown lighthouses – Race Point, Wood End and Long Light

Actually we and then I tried to visit these three lights on two different days. They are all along the very end of the Cape, beyond Provincetown itself and not easy to reach. Race Point light is no longer functional as a lighthouse, it’s become a B&B, as have the two houses next to it. We started to walk the 2+ miles to reach it on an incredibly windy day. The good thing about the wind, apart from its cooling effect, was that it kept the green flies away. The walk is down a fire road lined with short pine trees, wild flowers and bushes for about a mile, and then in the open through a marshy area full of lovely swaying marshy green grasses. By the time we were getting close and would have turned onto the sandbar behind the beach where the lighthouse lay another half mile or so away, the wind was so strong (and there had been serious thunderstorm warnings which of course never came to anything) that we got worried we’d be blown away and turned back.

Unfortunately, my photos that day were on my iPhone, which I discovered just cannot cope with distance. They are so bad that I’m too embarrassed to show them. Blurry, you can barely see the lighthouse, and the beauty of the surrounding area is lost completely.

So today I tried again from another angle. I walked across the dike you can see in this photo of huge rocks, water on both sides, hoping to get all the way across, and then in the middle of the dike, the stones started being difficult to cross and I got scared and turned back. For a while I was behind two women a bit younger than me, also cautious, but we helped and chivvied each other to keep going. Then the one in front refused to go further, she was just too unsure of her footing. I wasn’t about to go further on my own at that stage, so I turned back with them. Damn! Some people just hopped across.

Can you see the light to the right of the dike, that dot all the way across the water? Here is another view that shows how lovely the marshes are with the lighthouse a bit larger: 

And here is one of the other two lights, Wood End light, even further away and blurry in the enlarged version of the photo here. Not sure how to get closer just now. May try it another time.

As for Long light, it was just too far away to get a photo at all. I’m going to check out the water taxis tomorrow if the weather is nice. Still, I think I’ve got lots more to show than I had before these trips. Shall I drive down to the Chatham light too? Now that is a long long drive. To the tip of the elbow of the Cape. Watch this space!!

More and more lighthouses – the Three Sisters and the Nauset Light

I’m on Cape Cod again (hurray!) and in just two days this week I’ve visited another lighthouse and another and another one! On one day, we were headed for the Nauset light, which is on the ocean side of north Eastham, you’ll see it in a minute from every possible angle. But first we discovered the Three Sisters, inland a third of a mile from her, all three plunked down in a clearing surrounded by trees, where they certainly can’t light the way as they used to long ago, but preserved for people to be charmed by. Here is the first sister, the others are hiding behind her, especially number three, who is in the second picture far behind number two:

And then we went down a path through the trees towards the beach, till we got to the Nauset light. What a lovely light! Suddenly there she was through the trees! 

This lighthouse had to be moved because the coast where it stood was crumbling. And the lightkeeper’s house, over 100 years old, was moved with it and sits right next door. There’s no longer a lightkeeper but there is a voluntary group who stopped the lighthouse being demolished and now they keep it tidy, show people round, and keep it well painted and looking very dressed up. So here she is, from all angles!

I warned you it would be from all angles! Isn’t she sweet? And here she is with the lighthouse keeper’s cottage:

We were even able to climb up inside and see the top where the light was going round and round. Here are two shots of the top of the light, from inside, where the two lights are going round:

OK, time to leave and let the kids in who are waiting outside to climb up. Wave bye-bye! 

North Truro light, Cape Cod, 2010

Cape Town was my favourite lighthouse — until I went to see the light in North Truro on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA, which if truth were told, I have seen not once but dozens of times since my childhood, but never as I saw it on this day. I took more than a dozen pictures from every possible angle and distance with this one, it fascinated me. The result is beyond what I thought I was capable of in a photograph, it’s like a painting, and when I printed it for an exhibition in February 2011 at the Barbican Centre library in London, near where I live, of a dozen of my pictures, I couldn’t believe how lovely it looked. Here it is.

And I’m going back to see it again soon, in July 2011. But for now, this is the end of my posts with the lighthouses I have known.

Southwold lighthouse, Suffolk, 2010

I wouldn’t have believed there could be a lighthouse sitting in the middle of a large village, even a seaside village, instead of right on the shore. But there it is, in the village of Southwold in Suffolk on the east coast of England. What counts, of course, is that the light at the top is higher than everything around it, so that nothing prevents it from shining out to sea. But from certainly angles, as you walk up the streets to try and get near it, this light is hidden by the houses around it. Here was my first view of it, tucked in the middle of the neighbourhood.

And here it is again from another angle, where you can tell how high it actually is.

The entrance was lovely too, with its white picket fence and shield over the door!

Lisbon lighthouse and monument, 2009

In Lisbon in 2009, where I went to yet another conference, this one on access to medical abortion pills, we took the tram down along the water to where all the museums could be found, e.g. the nautical museum, the contemporary art museum, an enormous former  monastery, and much more, including this lighthouse. It wasn’t my favourite at the time, but it’s growing on me even as I study it now. It’s certainly the only brown and beige striped lighthouse I’ve encountered, and it is quite petite compared to others, with a lovely shape. And that day certainly boasted the bluest sky I have ever seen.

But the really spectacular monument on that long pier was this one. You can see how enormous it is from the size of the people walking toward it.

Here’s what its prow (it was of a ship) looked like closer up. A huge impressive sculpture, try to imagine how it was done.

Cape Town: my favourite lighthouse so far, 2008

In November 2008, I went to Cape Town to the AWID conference. But what I remember most is the afternoon we drove down the road by the ocean, with rain pelting down and the wind blowing madly. We stopped the car so I could take some photos. Here is one of my best — a red and white lighthouse surrounded by palm trees.

Meanwhile, here’s what it looked like out to sea at that moment.

Was I ever glad to be in a car!

Isle of Wight lighthouse, 2007

In the summer of 2007, I discovered another lighthouse while on holiday on the Isle of Wight. By this time, I had decided to try and photograph lighthouses as a sort of project, if one per year can be considered a project. I never did get close up to this one. We were walking high up on the hills of the island and it was far down below by the sea. So I took photos from one spot but using the lens to get a bit closer. The sun was brilliant and the sea was sparkling. It was a magic place!!

Colonia, Uruguay, lighthouse and island, 2007

A year later I went to Buenos Aires for a meeting of editors of journals on reproductive and sexual health, sexuality, and related health and human rights issues. The aim was to help a Chilean group to set up an internet course on how to write articles for academic journals. After the meeting, I went with two of my friends from the city on a boat over to the small island of Colonia, which is in Uruguay. There we found a lighthouse on one side of the island. This is the photo. There was also a lovely garden in the middle of the island that included a beautiful flowering tree whose name I don’t know and lovely houses on the surrounding cobbled streets. One door had a beautiful lace curtain. It was an easygoing day until we went to catch the boat back in the evening  (I had to go straight to the airport from Buenos Aires when we docked) and we discovered we were in a different time zone from Buenos Aires and our boat had left an hour before. I took the next boat (I had to leave them behind; I was lucky to get on as it was packed) and I had to race in a taxi to the airport to catch my plane. Just made it! Whew!!!

Discovering lighthouses

This was my first lighthouse. Actually, that’s not true. The lighthouses that first interested me were on Cape Cod, but this was the first decent photo I took of them. It’s on the main island of the Farne Islands, where I went in 2006 by boat with Linda from Northumberland to see the birds nesting there. It was a grey, chilly day and I won’t bore you with bird bird photos, at least not with this post, but there were thousands of birds nesting on that island, mainly puffins and artic terns. It was quite a day, as it turned out that Linda was terrified of boats and was quaking in her boots all the way there and back. But we made it without incident and my love of lighthouses turned into a photographic quest.

Below you can see how the lighthouse looked as we were leaving the island, and within seconds after I took this photo, you couldn’t see it at all anymore.

  

But then, as we headed toward shore, we came across another lighthouse on a small uninhabited island, no more than a bit of rock jutting out into the water.

And then it too was gone.

Not more than 20 or 30 minutes later, we were back to the mainland.