To the Lighthouse!

So, a great way to start the day, walking along a beach at the top of Fanad Head.

I was positively giddy the whole time I was on this beach, although it doesn’t show.

One of the great things about beaches here is how good they smell. In the U.S., because it is much hotter, you are more likely to get a rotting seaweed smell. The sight or smell of seafood makes me nauseous and I think it has something to do with the way seaweed offends my nostrils. Here, the air is so clean and so fresh you feel like breathing takes years of wear and tear off your life, you just feel renewed.

Eventually, we left the beach to explore Fanad Lighthouse.

We took the tour, which included the collection of the lighthouse’s in tact signal flag collection.

Our tour guide was a native Gaelic speaker. He explained the two red bars in the light tower indicated two sets of deadly rocks north and south of the tower. The Titanic’s sister ship, Laurentic, sunk nearby during WWI, struck by mines laid by German U-boats. Loss of life: 354 people, 121 survived. Many survived the sinking only to freeze to death in lifeboats during a blizzard.

The waters around the lighthouse are full of wrecks, some predating the mid-1800s lighthouse. They just don’t build things like they used to:

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