Framedlight

After our fantastic foggy start to the day we got to the lighthouse as the mist cleared and the sun shone. Point Reyes is the windiest place on the north American coast (in the spring winds can reach up to 130mph velocity) and the second foggiest. Not surprisingly many ships were wrecked off it's shore trying to get into San Francisco harbour. The lighthouse was built in 1870, after blasting an area 300ft below the cliff to try and lower the lighthouse under the level of the normally high fog. A fog signal was built as well. On the day of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 the lighthouse moved north around 18ft. The only damage was that the lens came off it's rail and the lighthouse keeper manage to effect repairs so that it was up and working by the next day. The manned lighthouse was in operation until 1975 when an automatic light was installed. The consequence of the lighthouse being lowered is that you have to negotiate a half mile walk from the car park followed by 30...

We had had an interesting night in the Samuel P Taylor Campsite, close to Point Reyes and on the Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, named as Drake stopped on Point Reyes in 1579 to make repairs to the Golden Hind. The campsite was a large forested area where they had turned off most of the water, allegedly because of drought. This meant of course that showering was out of the question, even though our clothes were now clean. I am not sure whether it was our odour that attracted the racoons but a family descended on our picnic table while were eating and chattered round the surrounding branches. So delightful, although they apparently carry rabies. An early start saw us driving to the Bear Valley Visitor Centre which was closed at that hour. This is the parking place for the earthquake trail, a short walk around the fault line. The San Andreas fault lies along the line separating the peninsula from the mainland, where Highway 1 now runs. The visitor centre had an invasion of small...