nj lighthouse challenge

it's what you've all been waiting 4 months for… the million posts from the nj lighthouse challenge.

that weekend was a whirlwind. a dangerous, fun, damaging, exciting, tornado. definitely not our best trip, but still fun. some trips are just like that.

first of all, the planning was rough. we just could never get the three of us together for some good planning, and if there's one thing any good lighthouse expedition needs, its good planning. we'd (shelly, laura, and i) get together and just when we were starting to make some headway, (2 or 3 hours in) one or two of us would have to leave. darn those 14 children and 3 husbands that call us away from our light housing! ;)

then there were so many variables. because it's a lot of work to get away and arrange for our families, we like to really maximize our time away. so we looked, and researched, and planned, and talked, and decided we'd try to charter a boat to see the delaware/nj water lights on the friday before the challenge - there are a lot of them. but despite our best efforts, including making numerous contacts with the nj lighthouse challenge people, and posts on various lighthouse enthusiasts pages, we couldn't get enough interest to make chartering a boat worthwhile.

so then we had to decide if we should start at the northern end of nj, or the southern end. depending on which direction we headed, we could plan additional lights along the way. also, some lights are not open all day, so there is again, a lot to take into account. christian had his last game thursday night, so my wonderful friends were willing to leave early, early friday morning. then we decided that right across from northern nj is manhattan, and lots of little lights there! a plan was hatched!

we split up the lights so that each of us researched lighthouses and could give each other the lowdown. i liked that, it was fun to research and learn new facts about the lovely lighthouses we visited. ultimately, we saw 32 lighthouses, but i think we had planned to see around 40. we each had something like 13 lights to study up on.

in retrospect, we planned way too much and too poorly to be able to see that many lighthouses. it wasn't as fun as it could have been if we would have calmed down and taken time to smell the roses, but as that has never been my strong suit, i am not holding my breath that i'll be able to do that any time soon. i'm a work in progress though, so we'll see. :)