Episode 49 - Lighthouse Tourism

0:00 I'm Vince. I'm Emily. And you're listening to The Lighthouse Lowdown. Lighthouses represent the living, real history and culture of the communities they serve. They stand tall, regardless of their stature. They're valued threads in the fabric of culture. They bind the traditions and stories of each community together. Every single person I have ever spoken to about their local lighthouse has had kind regard, respect, and fond emotions surrounding their beacon. While many of lights have, in the past, served to warn of hazards, to keep away, to avoid contact, today they call us in.

0:46 Lighthouses serve now as a meeting place, a safe harbor, a path to our past. As constant symbols of the best of each generation, lighthouses today need us, as we have needed them for so many years in the past. To keep the flame alight, to keep the lights on, and to keep the stories alive. There's a constant need for support within the lighthouse community today. The best way to do so is to visit, volunteer, donate, and tour. Today we're talking about lighthouse tourism in the United States. Okay, Ty, that's pretty. Isn't that cool? Did you write that? I did. Wow. Very nice. It's true.

1:27 Lighthouses run on donations, and that comes in the form of showing up and paying to get in. Yes. Well, I just, I wanted to talk about, obviously, lighthouse tourism, but I wanted to, I wanted to write to myself, not, I wasn't planning to read this, but to see why I'm doing this, why I want to have this conversation. It's not just a, this is something you can do, but what gets me excited about it, what makes me think about it. So I wrote it to myself, and then I wrote it to write to you, to say to you. We wrote to write to say. Yes. And as customary, I will now talk about our lighthouse buoy of the day.

2:08 Okay. First of all, it's called history buoy. I don't know what's going on with you today. Oh, it's written as history buoy. We should tell everybody it's Friday. We just got off work and it was a full week. So here we are talking line houses. Yeah. After work on a Friday is a rough time, but there's, we have. Boy, and see in our souls because it's weekend. Yes. And I made some espresso. Yeah. I offered Starbucks and Vince still wanted to make at home coffee and it's, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. It's not Starbucks. It's different. It's hot. Boston. So I'm going to take over the screen with my other screen for a minute to show you where I'm going.

2:50 So we're going to lighthouse patents on the U S LHS website, which is United States lighthouse society for those of you who have not listened, I just went and found a random patent because I thought it was super cool and I got sucked into this thing. So we're going to talk about the Stuart improvement and fog signals patent. These. Okay. So how many do they have? They have like so many patents. Yeah. So it's one of their, one of their resources, lighthouse technology. Okay. So are these, are these like patents that they've adopted like in lighthouses or something? Yeah. I mean, it's a historical record. So yeah, these are, if you go to the, this website and then go to resources, I love their resources page because I'm a lighthouse nerd as are many of you.

3:35 And I'm also an engineer. So I saw lighthouse technology and I was like pumped up. My favorite history I've done. Wow. My favorite history buoy that I've done so far was lightning rods, which did not come from this source, but I was just super excited because it's technology and historical technology is cool. Also, we don't know how, like how we got to where we are now. Yeah. Okay. I am excited about this one. So this is some diagrams that are part of Stuart. I'm just going to call them Stuart. It's his last name, but wrote this whole thing invented and wrote this whole thing. Okay. These are some images and then below, if you want to read, I read this whole thing and I won't read it to you now, but basically it's an improvement in fog signals, 1873.

4:24 So awesome lighthouse era. And this is super cool because I'm a mechanical engineer and this dude is very innovative and I would love to have seen something like this work. So basically what the point of it is, it describes the problem early in the patent description as there are many ways to charge the use of a fog signal, like either a bell or a whistle and to store the energy to be expended, to emit the noise, but they mostly rely at the time, they mostly relied on waves. So as a storm would come in, the waves would pick up and go back down and that continuous motion would provide a float with motion.

5:10 The float would drive the system that drives either the steam whistle or the fog bell. This is a similar system, except it's designed to work at all times. So not every storm or not every fog condition rather has big waves, but what's always going on with the ocean is the tide, the movement of tide. So this over time uses a float, which is labeled as figure A. If you're looking at the ocean, the image in figure one, letter A uses this as basically a box and they talk about the different configurations it could be, but this is a float. So as the tide rise and fall, the float goes up and down. It moves a lever arm, which moves a set of hooks that come down to connect to the lever arm and it winds a set of gears, which use weights, falling weights as in clockwork to store energy.

6:06 So over time, this lever goes up and down and it actually acts as a ratchet, you know, where it clicks one way, but not the other and picks up the weight. And then when you need to activate it, the fall of the weight and he goes on to say that's not part of the patent that can be done using modern clockworks of the time to use different weights or different velocities or different whatever. But basically this thing can just be stationary, no electricity all the time. It's taking the tide of the ocean water and storing it as potential energy in a falling weight, which I think is super cool. So the unique part of it is that it ratchets and it uses this set of hooks that come down.

6:51 And then once the hooks get to the bottom, there's a shape that's described down here and the shape spreads those hooks and they disengage. So it goes once and once and once every time the waves go up and down, but it's not waves, it's tide. So it's a slower constant weight to store energy. I don't know if this was a successful use. I don't know anywhere that it was used specifically, but I just saw this and read through it and I super nerded out. It's so cool. There's witnesses. It's pretty cool that you can just read through them. Yeah. 1873. It's very technical writing, still fully understand everything. I think there's one word I did not know, which makes you feel stoops, but I thought it was super cool.

7:35 I wonder what you get for a patent. Grapple hooks. Bifurcated? Bifurcated? No, I know that one. What is it? It means split. That's it? Split evenly. Yeah. Why do they just say split? Use a lot of fancy words. Stupid. Yeah. I'm aware that the latter may be employed with closely approximate results and I therefore do not limit myself to actuating weights per se as springs are considered as equivalent thereof and employed in similar connection. Springs were way out more, wouldn't they? They were out, yeah. Especially at the time, spring metal was not as good, but I just thought this is cool. Very cool. Now I kind of want to look through all of them and see, especially ones like that they have Winslow Lewis's reflector.

8:20 They were everywhere. I wonder if the Fresnel lens was patented. There's lens technology in there. Tourism. So you want to go on a trip and you want to see a lighthouse too. So you want to go on a trip, do you? The good news is for us in the United States, all but 19 states have lighthouses. They're all just snuggled up in there in the middle. I mean, anywhere there's coastline, right? Oceans. Oceans. I don't know. I mean, Gulf and the Great Lakes all have lighthouses. And I would still like to see Kansas have a lighthouse, maybe Missouri. We don't have a reason. Come on.

9:01 We've got like Table Rock Lake. There's some lakes. I'm sure there's a tiny lighthouse somewhere on Lake of the Ozarks. Yeah. Someone's backyard. Exactly. So this is sourced from Lighthouse Friends, which is a website. They do a great job. Yeah, they do. And then here I jumped. Let's say you click on the state of North Carolina. I chose this because we've been to here. So you click on the state and it takes you to a Google map that they've set up, which is just awesome. All the black lighthouses, black and white that are shown on their map are no longer standing. What? That sucks. Yeah. There's black icons for lighthouses no longer standing. Yep.

9:42 You know, this makes me sad because being born in the 1990s, we've missed out. You know, we've been born in the 1890s. Yeah, but we got our own stuff. Like what? Cell phones, social media, music, television. I want Grant's Island Lighthouse back. I want Campbell Island Lighthouse back. Well. I want Beacon Island Lighthouse back. You can click on any of these and I'll take you to the Lighthouse Friends web page for that lighthouse. I didn't know. So where do you find this map? Lighthouse friends dot com. Just like on the front cover or? It's in there.

10:22 Yeah. I don't know exactly. But that's really cool. Let's see. Yeah. Lighthouse friends dot com. The very main thing that comes up is maps, lighthouse maps also has Canada on here. It's cool. That is nice. Cool. Off here. So that's a resource for you. If you want to think about travel in general in the U.S., that's a place to start. So why would someone want to see a lighthouse on their vacation? Because we love lighthouses. Because they listen to our podcast. That's a simple answer. But there's a lot of reasons. Some of them, some of them. I'd like you to weigh in. They're always a hub of history. Like all the time.

11:02 I don't know. Long Point Lighthouse. I saw this on a website and I was like, you know what? These kids right here. Probably kids. Maybe they're small men or women. I don't know. There's history there. There's probably a long history at every lighthouse, especially the one still standing. Some of the culture you get to experience in tourism of lighthouses is less touristy, less touristy and more local. I mean, a lot like we've talked about this. I've talked about it too many times, but the local culture of lighthouses is what's really important. Yeah. It's very niche subject. Yeah. They're run by volunteers. If you do support them, you're usually supporting the local economy, which is good.

11:44 Lighthouses are almost always a photo and video hotspot. Thanks to Instagram and YouTube and literally all of the internet. Scenic. Scenic. Very pretty places. I say that they can make a physical memory for you and the kids. So one of our neighbors in our area here near the RipRap studio has a Cape Hatteras stained glass art piece hanging in their window, among other pieces. They had a garage sit when I stopped by and that was not for sale. But I did talk to the lady and she was probably in her seventies or eighties and she was talking about, yeah, I don't, I don't know where that lighthouse is at, but we went there as kids and her sister was there and I was like, I know where it's at.

12:28 We went there as kids. It's like memorable. It sticks with you. They remember it from long ago in their lives and it was a special thing for them. And they don't even know where it's at, but they hold onto that piece of art. I think that's just kind of common. Not everybody's a huge lighthouse nerd like we are, but I think that that impression can last with a lot of people. Yeah, for sure. Especially young kids. Yes. Cause it's so, it's usually, I mean, some of them are short, but they're still like, it's like a very strange, impactful sort of building. Yeah. Yeah. They're not, there's, there's no lighthouses commonplace. Yeah. And a lot of, a lot of times you have to seek them out because they're not. Yeah. They're not in the middle of things. It's not like going to see like a popular museum or a park or something.

13:13 Right. They're good for getting on your feet while you're on vacation. That's true. You are almost doing walking tours every time. Some of them you can climb, which is good for your health. Speaking of walking tours, long, long point is the name of the lighthouse that's on long point in Massachusetts. No shit. No, no. I'm done. I'm totally expired. Listen, we are going to walk there, go across the dike, see Woodend. And then you see a long point lighthouse, but there, it doesn't look anything like that.

13:53 But that's true for a lot of lighthouses in Massachusetts. I think this one's gone and replaced. With the one that we have. Interesting. I did a really bad job. I had some photos I put together to click through and kind of talk about cool stuff. It's not a bad job. This is a good opportunity to pull up random lighthouses and be like, look how cool this is. Especially AT40. Okay. I'm back on. Beautiful views, right? All the time. Goes along with the beachfront. They're always, almost, on a beach, which people like. Or there's a beach nearby. Beaches. I don't know. I mean, you could spend an hour, if you have a vacation, right, you could spend an hour at a stop, even less.

14:34 You could spend a day, you could spend weeks just doing lighthouse tours. In fact, we'll talk about it later, but there are specific tours to see lighthouses, both sponsored by the United States Lighthouse Society and others. Yeah. So you can really get into it if you want. And you know, they have a lot of things like you just pay someone. Okay. Let me collect my thoughts. There are some ferries that you can pay for a ticket and the ferry goes around to like four or five different lighthouses. So you just sit on a boat, hang out. Sometimes they got food, drinks, a lighthouse cruise. That's what the cruise, I couldn't think of the word, but yeah, you're going to go around and they tell you the history and everything.

15:18 That's such a cool thing you could pay for to go on a trip somewhere and see some lighthouses. Well, there's opportunity too. I mean, thinking of thinking of the word cruise. We talked to our guy, the Bahamas, Toby Smith. Toby Smith. Yes. And I saw an article recently that he's still pursuing that. Oh, good. Yeah. So listen to that. Listen to that episode. But we talked to him. Every cruise ship that comes into Nassau, Bahamas goes right past what is his lighthouse. But it's also, I mean, it's the people's lighthouse, right? He owns the land, but it's a missed opportunity. There's no one going to visit there right now. And all those cruise ships coming in and out, going right by.

16:01 And there's some really, really great photos of this lighthouse of people passing by on a cruise because they're so high up on the cruise ships that it looks like drone footage. So they get really good pictures of it. And then they don't even get a chance to go and see it. Like there should be some big billboard that's like, when you get off at the harbor, come on over. Yeah. Well, and it doesn't need to be the main attraction. Of course, there's many other things to see, but it's the lighthouse. It's cool. I just wish there's opportunities like that out there that are not yet developed. And people like Toby Smith are working on that. But man, if you do have the opportunity, consider it special. Like I just went through a slide we talked about. It showed St. Augustine lighthouse.

16:43 And a lot of people in our community know of St. Augustine and how well they've done with their tourism development. It's they've done a fantastic job. So there's more opportunities. I think it's cool. The last thing I have on the reasons to go, it might not be there forever. Yeah. Which is really unfortunate. So sad, especially like places like Maine right now are really struggling because their lighthouse is getting beat crap with storms and things like the intensity of these storms is causing real damage. And there's no promise that the lighthouse is going to be able to recover. You know, that's we take for granted that they're still here after all these years. But that does mean that that's many years of corrosion or wood rot or, you know, stones cracking, crumbling the earth, erosions.

17:30 It's all like 150 years of being on the edge of rough seas takes its toll. So I know we need people to go so that they can pay for restorations. So I've said my piece. It's a nice picture. I'm not too sure this is AI, but I'm all right with it. So to a spreadsheet. All right. You need to plan your trip. I've really boiled myself down, folks. I've come up with just three things. Oh, wow. You need one of the financial budget. That's what that's not what your spreadsheets do not scream three simple steps. Yeah.

18:10 Break it down to spreadsheets. They're color coded. It's all linked to things. It's wonderful. OK. I'm going to talk about this to what's on screen, but you need a financial budget because for almost everybody out there that matters. You need a time budget, which again, if you're retired, I envy you in some ways. And then you have a must have, must do, must see list. So if you've already planned a trip, there's some resources for you. But that is what you want to narrow down to. We're going to come back to the spreadsheet as far as discussion goes. If you've already planned a trip, a couple of things I recommend search the Internet for lighthouses along your route. It's the most modern, most updated, probably widest set of resources.

18:54 The best thing I would say actually on this list, it's bolded is ask a local if you have an opportunity, write an email, reach out to somebody, make a phone call. And I have this on screen now. Take a tour of Maryland's lighthouses. This is from visit Maryland dot com or whatever that whatever their name is. But it's a state sponsored tourism. You know, come see Kansas. We don't have lighthouses, but every state has this opportunity. Yeah, like hot spots. They all have that info. And a note that a lot of lighthouses, not a lot. OK, but some lighthouses don't show up on Google when you go to a spot and type in lighthouses and click enter sometimes because they're labeled on Google as like light stations or something, you know, or they just don't show up for some reason.

19:39 So you have to do like a little bit more of a search than just putting it into the maps. Well, and on the Web, I'd say USLHS dot org, Lighthouse Friends. I think it's dot com state tourism websites. And then, of course, the Lighthouse Lowdown podcast. We're doing more to develop areas of interest that you could put them together. And like the Outer Banks, North Carolina is one we did early on. A bunch of awesome lighthouses. Also, if you're a reader, we have met a couple of authors that we've had as friends of the Lighthouse Lowdown. Fred Stonehouse and Jeremy Dattremont are both authors of several books. I didn't know that about Jeremy until recently.

20:19 But there's other ways to take it in if you're tired of just looking at your screen. So that's if you have a trip planned. Yeah, to integrate little lighthouses. We're next to water somewhere. There's probably a lighthouse even in Boston. I saw I noticed California doesn't have as many lighthouses as they want them to have. It's a big state. You go into California and there's no LA and there's no lighthouses nearby. What's up with that? I don't know. LA, can you tell us? Shame on you. So if you're up to plan a trip, I would my tastes are obvious. I would listen to podcasts or watch YouTube videos about traveling to your areas of interest. There's lots of producers, us and others that cover that type of content.

21:04 Take an area based on your time and financial budgets, plot out all of your options, everything that you would be interested in seeing, and then cut it down to a tenable list. That's my hardest part. And then I say, see our video for an example. So all this is building into Emily and I are going on another lighthouse trip. We're very excited. We're going to the Cape Cod area. It's going to be fun. We're about to be living the dream. We're really excited. I have a video. It's going to be posted on YouTube as well. We have audio with it as well. Sorry, what? That video of our discussion where we talked about lifehouses and our trips. Okay.

21:45 And I'm going to go back on screen. We're so tired. So this spreadsheet, everybody loves the spreadsheet. If you want it, reach out to me. Oh, slow down at gmail.com. You're going to sell your commodities. No, I'm giving it away. It's a Google sheet. So I'll just send you a link and you can make your own. But basically what I've done here, it's one of several tabs. You're welcome. And basically it sums up. We wanted to go somewhere. As you can see the title of this one, Pacific Northwest Lighthouse Loop of 2024. This was not the winner of this time. Not even close. I wanted this one. Obviously it's a competition.

22:25 This is my top pick. We went with Emily's top pick. We chose my option. And there's multiple tabs. Basically I put together a Google map that shows where we would drive, where we'd fly into. I picked hotels that I thought looked cool, what the rental car was going to cost. And I did gas estimates, food estimates, entertainment, other in total. So this is finances we're looking at. And for we're trying to do it on the cheap kind of. Which is hard because since lighthouses are on the water, they tend to lean more touristy places. Like Cape Cod's super touristy, super affluent.

23:07 And so our food and lodging costs are way higher than if we decided to go somewhere where it wasn't. Keep in mind we're from Kansas City. So anywhere we can drive anywhere. But Chicago is far for us. And even though we're both in the Midwest according to the rest of the world. Are we not Midwest? I would say that we're in the Midwest and Chicago is in the East. But that's a lot of people would find that laughable. Oh, Chicago is Chicago is considered Midwest. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So the point is our local economy here. Things are cheaper than on the coasts. Yeah, truly everywhere in the U.S. So that's our perspective is expensive.

23:48 But the point is you can plan your own trip on paper and then present it to your spouse and say, hey, here's what I want to do. Here's exactly what it costs. Here's how many days it is. How many hours will be in the car? You know, have those discussions and then you can negotiate on what you want to do. So this is like maybe you're not an engineer nerd like I am. But this is where I like to start is with numbers because I don't even know if I can afford to go on the trip. I don't know how many days of PTO, how many all these things. So this is helping me to start that. But please, if you're interested, go watch our other video. I don't know the title yet, but it will be obvious. It will be our lighthouse pitches. And we cover a couple of different options in that video.

24:32 And there's a screen capture with it just like this video. So you can follow along and see what that exercise is like. I didn't I didn't want to embed it here because it makes the video really long. So yeah. And you can see the difference between me. If you go to the YouTube, you can see the difference between me and Vince and our organizational styles because our spreadsheets look a little different. And that's all I have to say about that. Yeah. Go look at the difference between a typical mechanical and a typical chemical engineer. Excuse me. I'm not representative of the chemical engineers in this world. Typical. I'm an artist. So I'm just going to click through a couple more resources.

25:13 I got a shout out because really we have great resources today. So this is what we talked about earlier a little bit. The US LHS has their own page travel tab tours and traveling adventures. You can also see on the left. So there's there's tours, there's cruises, there's accommodations. Oh, they have two lighthouses, Point No Point and Point Wilson. Both are northwest of Seattle. Pretty sure. OK. But they have beautiful photos. We covered them before when I talked about the US LHS. And you can stay in a lighthouse. You can also stay in line houses, other places we've discovered. Yeah, there's lots of good ones. Right. That are not through the US LHS, but through some are state parks even some of them are totally private airbnbs.

25:58 So what? So I'm trying to think of there was a location recently where the lighthouse itself is not an airbnb. You're Split Rock. I can't remember. I think it was one of the. Oh, I can't remember what it was. Because one of the one of the lighthouses in one of the pitches that I was doing for you, there was a place to stay. It was like an airbnb that said that it was a lighthouse, but it wasn't the lighthouse. It was like down the street from the lighthouse. So it's like it actually gets pretty complicated trying to stay in a lighthouse. Some of them are really, really expensive, like a thousand dollars a night. And some of them are pretty cheap. And you just can't just have to figure out like Big Bay Lighthouse, I think, was one of them that I wanted to stay at.

26:43 It was not very expensive. But I mean, for another example, we talked about in San Francisco, East Brother Light. That's not only an airbnb. It's a whole experience. Yeah, like you episode. They're pretty successful. But that's a whole, you know, it's a financial. I don't even know how much it costs. I assume it's more expensive. Yeah, I did too. But you get a boat ride out there. They're private chefs. It's a whole thing. Oh, here's a good one. White Shoal Lighthouse. You go out for I think it's three days. They just drop you off. And it's like physically demanding. You survive with a knife. Yeah, exactly. It's like being let out in the woods for like a coming of age story. Awesome. But it's very expensive.

27:24 I can't remember exactly what the cost was. But it was like, oh, my gosh, like it's white sand. You have no no white shoals. White Shoals. White Shoals. Ghosts. So White Shoals is in Michigan. Yeah, it's like out on the lake. Oh, man. Isn't that wild? It's just its own thing. It's just it's like out on the Cason. Google reviews. Twelve of them. Five stars. Yeah, people. It's. Oh, this is so cool. It's an experience. So I unfortunately I'm not showing this on screen, but maybe we'll cover it on its own. Yeah, I have it on my list. Because I saw. But anyway, that's a tangent from what I was trying to say is that it's kind of hard to find places to stay or lighthouses to stay in because it varies so greatly on one availability to cost.

28:17 And if you can even find it on Google, because it's not intuitive, it's just usually it's just labeled as a bed and breakfast. So it's like, oh, you're going to really hunt them down. You have to know. Yeah. The other thing is they're not going and building new ones. Yeah, they're not like it's like Las Vegas. Everything's new and you can replace it right away. That's what Vegas needs. Is a lighthouse one and two. It's got to be an Airbnb. There's no water. They're a casino in it. Why the heck not? That would be so cool though. And then like the really rich people could stay up like in the lantern room. They guess you heard it here first. I'm going to patent it. OK, you do that.

28:57 Also on the US LHS, there's videos of some of their past tours and that's what I'm going to do. Also on the US LHS, there's videos of some of their past tours and I watched a couple. People are having fun. Yeah. So it's like a culmination of all the things that happened. Oh, that's fun. Yeah. We'll get together and getting on their tour bus. Oh, I really want to go. There was a trip they posted recently that was like twelve thousand dollars or something to go. I want to be retired and I want to be rich at the same time. I saw one in Ireland coming up. I was like, oh, that'd be awesome. That would be cool. So Ireland Lighthouses. We haven't really branched out around the world yet.

29:38 I've looked at some. I had fun doing a couple of international lighthouses in the past, but now I'm really loving covering American lighthouses. The international are really cool. It's just harder to find. But I mean, look at this. Northern Spain, Australia, Tasmania, Newfoundland, Italy, Scotland, Ireland, Iceland. So cool. It is cool. So this is just a snip again, but same website. Some of theirs are tours. Oh, Maine. Is that Quatty? Yeah, that looks like West Quatty. Nice. Wow. Some more opportunities for learning. Lighthouse Digest. I really want this. I really want it.

30:18 So there's a magazine called the Lighthouse Digest, which is put out by the USLHS. Is that right? No, it's a separate entity. OK, never mind what I just said. But the guy who started this recently passed away. Oh, no. They are continuing it. So yeah. Yeah. So it looks awesome. But that'd be another good resource. I keep saying these things. I think of my multiple generations of family and how we could all enjoy lighthouses in a different format. Yeah, that's true. Like you don't have to be a lighthouse person to enjoy a lighthouse trip. I think that's the other thing is people think because it is a niche thing that you have to be into that in order to go and visit.

30:59 But lighthouses aren't you don't have so many lighthouses are not off by themselves in the middle of nowhere. That's the ones that we would go to because you plan a whole trip around actually going to those places. But a lot of lighthouses like Cape Cod are just smack dab in the middle of a million other things you could be traveling to go do. How many people have heard of Cape Cod and would like to go visit just packing some lighthouses? Thunder Bay. Thunder Bay. You know, the Great Lakes Thunder Bay up there. I don't know. You know, Astoria, Oregon, the Gulf, every, every coastline. I'm just talking US, but every coastline has lighthouses and it blows me away.

31:43 And a lot of them are in national parks and national parks is another like niche thing that people like to go do. Like there's this one girl that I work with that collects park pins. Yeah. And like stickers and stuff. Cool. And I mean, it's just like this huge culmination of all the places she's been to. It's obvious that she seeks out going to national parks for her trips and some of them have lighthouses gets at the lighthouse. I just saw one. I can't tell you what it is because it's a future episode that it looks awesome. It's a international park in California, which is beautiful. But I'm intrigued. Yeah. But I just, the other thing I want to say about traveling and visiting lighthouses, when we first started this and we started to learn about lighthouses, we started with North Carolina was the first ones I was exposed to.

32:31 We talked about, you know, every lighthouse is tall and it's a tower and it's got a fuel oil house and it's got a keeper's quarters and you know, Fresnel. Yeah. Flashbacks to Fresnel. But I used to say, uh, this is so spoiled for me to say I got to travel in Western Europe a little bit and every little town you go to has a church. You got to see the church. It's got a bridge. You got to see the bridge and it's got some cute little downtown area that's been there forever and those are wonderful things. But eventually you're like, do I want to see another church? I mean, they're all beautiful.

33:12 They're all different, but I, I, so that's what I was thinking with lighthouses. Okay. It's another one of the same, but they're not that way. Yeah. They're all different. Look at the three on screen. I didn't even plan this. They're all physically different styles of lighthouses. I don't even know. They're probably all in very different places. They probably have their own story. The structures are different. The day marks are different. Um, yes, lighthouses are lighthouses, but, but they're not, there's more to it. And every single one, the thing that I get so interested in is the history of what's gone on there. The stories of why it's been significant or why it's significant today. Obviously I'm a nerd for it, but I accidentally did this and I find it interesting.

33:54 We've got a, what is that? Screw pile, skeleton, skeleton and traditional tower. Yeah. Super cool. So we're talking about, I've never seen black and yellow stripes. What lighthouses that, um, it just processed. Don't know. It looks dope though. Yeah. It looks like a black and yellow, black and yellow. It's very cool. I have to look it up. I don't know that one. I've never seen that style. And there's the lighthouse passport. Which if you're not familiar, go watch the episode on the us LHS. We can't, I keep shouting us out. We're already on our own podcast, but you got to check it out because it's a really interesting episode and the passport program is awesome.

34:40 But basically the boil down is you get this passport book. It's a booklet and you collect stamps as you travel lighthouse to lighthouse after a certain number of stamps and you get a patch that shows, Hey, I've been to this many lighthouses and it goes on and on and on, but it's a fun way to document your travels. Uh, even if you're just going to see one, I just put it in a drawer. It's awesome. Really cool program. Very low cost. Here's some more swag from the passport program. The image on the right is just showing, you know, get a bunch of stamps. They're all different. What's the story? Aren't they designed and then submitted? Yeah. Stamp for a lighthouse. They design. Yeah, they design it. And then the lighthouse itself has to fund the creation of the stamp and then they have to keep it.

35:27 And so if you go, someone goes and asks for us the stamp and they can stamp your passport. So it's kind of has to be an agreement, but, um, I really like it. Even like Montauk point is on here. Super cool. And then this is kind of a, to pry you again, please do this. Just see a lighthouse on your trip. Or if you live near one, you haven't been there, check it out. It'd be an afternoon trip. I'll be very jealous, but this is a snip again from our us LHS episode that shows there are 334 at the time. Lighthouses in need of restoration just within the U S. Wow. So that doesn't mean they're decrepit when you visit them.

36:10 Right. So you see the layer of paint or something, you know, time passes and, uh, the way that you can support them and get something for yourself is to go visit. Oh, I did include the picture. This one is point, no point lighthouse in Washington. This is our headquarters. This is the headquarters of the US LHS. Although it's not, this is the actual lighthouse. The headquarters is right there. Oh, I just down the street. I was ready for that. But yes, and this is one of those places where you can stay. Um, there's accommodations here. It's a duplex. It is a duplex. This is point Wilson. I just love this photo. I know it's amazing sunset colors, but man, it's pretty. I gotta ask you one more time.

36:50 Go check out. If you've listened this far, please go check out our YouTube and go see the other video, which we talk about the pitches, have it on the background. Give us some critiques. Yeah. It really doesn't have a purpose. It's just kind of us discussing where we're going to go next. And through it, you can kind of see how we laid out the plans for visiting a bunch of lighthouses, but it kind of translates well to doing any sort of trip. So yeah, well, we surprised each other with our pitches, which is fun. And then we, we chose from these options, uh, and, you know, discuss budget and time and all that. So it does, I mean, it does have a purpose, but it'll be fun. Cool. Listen to it. It'd be super fun. Do you have anything else you want to add?

37:31 No, I will pitch myself again. Check out our YouTube, please check out our LinkedIn. Why don't you get professional with us here at the lighthouse? You're going to want to, you're going to want to, we don't bother you much. Also check out our Instagram because we always put pictures on there. Yeah. Our Instagram alike, a follow is always appreciated. And thank you, you MVP for listening all the way through this adventure. The lighthouse. XiaoLin 컨, Tencent.