One of our rules for Summer is “Go someplace new every week.”
So we went here:

I have lived in Oregon, an hour from the beach, nearly all my life and I had never seen the inside of a lighthouse. On a whim we decided to remedy that situation with a visit to Yaquina Head Lighthouse in Newport, Oregon.
It was so windy up there on the bluff, Newt threatened to blow away, much like a young Mary Poppins, sans umbrella.

Hold on sweetie!
We fought our way through the gale to the lighthouse entrance.

That little house-like section originally held oil for the lantern nearly 90 feet above. I’m not sure when they stopped lighting the lamp with oil. The lighthouse was automated in 1966, but they may have stopped lighting the oil lamp earlier than that. However long ago it was, it has not been long enough to erase the scent of oil that still faintly permeates the area.
We waited in line, listening to a guide share some of the lighthouse’s history and shooing the flies that gathered so thickly about, until it was our turn to ascend the 114 stairs to the top. Once again I thought of Mary Poppins and envied her ability of sliding up banisters.
Why was Mary Poppins so much on my mind?

Newt is not a fan of heights.
Nor of open riser stairs.
I wasn’t sure she’d make it. At one point she made the mistake of looking down. She then turned back to W and tried to give up.

However, since down was just as bad as up at this point she decided to continue. We assured her that the view from the top would be well worth it.
We were wrong. It wasn’t even photo worthy. The sea and sky were behaving like eighth grade girls and wore coordinating outfits that day. We could hardly tell where on began and the other ended.
Tell me girls still do that. That it hasn’t gone the way of other fads from my own dusty past – like wearing overalls with one strap undone.
So the view outside the window was ho-hum, but the lamp was fascinating and beautiful. And It still lights: two seconds on, two seconds off, 24 hours a day.

You can’t actually go into the bulb room. You view the light from a hatch in the floor accessed by a set of steep, ladder-like stairs. We took it in in all of it’s grandeur for about 4 seconds and then climbed down to make room for the hundreds of people waiting their turn behind us.
And then there was this:

I have to admit that coming down caused me to feel a bit shaky and dizzy. It really was high. But we made it down without incident.
Look at this face.

What you see here is a mixture of triumph and relief.
Back on solid ground “terrifying” was downgraded to “thrilling”.
It turned out to be a jolly holiday after all.