Bay Bridge, Exploritorium and Lighthouse

We visited the Bay Bridge this morning.  There was a celebration with government officials this morning celebrating the bridge's 75th birthday.  My camera's battery was dying so didn't get too many pictures.  Beautiful flower bed spelling 75 and a brass trio playing as part of the celebrations. Learned and saw that the cables are made up of 27,000 individual wires that were then spun to make the cables.  Hard to believe that this was done in 1937 during the depression, about the same time as Hoover Dam.  Such monumental accomplishments happening at such a hard time for our country.  Pretty remarkable testiment to the fortitude and strength of our country.

 

We walked a short distance over the bridge.  It was clear and very pictoresque but windy and cold.  Since we were so close to the Exploritorium, we went and visited.  This is an incredible hands on science discovery place.  This is a place that I think would be best to visit an hour or two once a month to fully appreciate it's magnitude.  Mark, Janae and Stefan enjoyed it but I found it a bit overwhelming.  I have a hard time focusing when there is so much. We got to watch a dissection of a cow's eye and Janae and Stefan got to make pictures out of a swinging pendulum.

We left around 2:30 and thought we would be ahead of the Memorial Day traffic.  Turns out, we weren't so we took a back road and drove out to the Point Reyes Lighthouse.  We had missed this the other day and wanted to see it.  It was a beautiful drive amidst pastoral farm land.  The pastures go right up to the coast and is sandy rather than rocky.  However, the lighthouse sits out on a rocky point and is one of the windiest places on the west coast. 
Though beautiful, the wind was whipping at 57 miles per hour and so the steps were closed to the lighthouse.  If winds are under 40 miles per hour, it's open for visitors.  Immediately feeling and hearing the howling of the wind, it is no wonder that many of the keepers lost their mind.  This wind with the isolation and fog would probably  be pretty hard to take day in and day out.

It was a beautiful drive home.  It had rained lightly and then the sun came out and there was the most awesome rainbow we've ever seen.  I didn't get a picture but did get this picture of the glorious lighting.