I Want to Know

“Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind.” – Theodore Roosevelt

There are a lot of things that bother me about social media, from the fact that most of the posts that people put out there aren’t even close to being positive. Something that bothers me about Instagram (and most of social media) is that when people post photos, they tell us little about where they captured them, and sometimes they don’t even put the city. I know some people do this because they are taking photos in their backyard and trying to protect their privacy. I get that. Sometimes I want to know a little bit about the place where the photo was taken. Did anything happen on the way to take the photo? What interesting things did you see on your journey? Those are the things I wish I saw more of. I love checking out great photos, but the stories behind them are what catch my attention.

When we visited IJmuiden during our European trip, we checked out a couple of lighthouses near the port. The Low Lighthouse of IJmuiden (locally known as the Lage vuurtoren van IJmuiden or “Little Lighthouse”) is a historic, 24-meter-tall cast-iron tower located along the coast at Seinpostweg 19 in IJmuiden, Netherlands. Designed by prominent architect Quirinus Harder and built in 1878, it serves as a critical maritime marker. Together with its taller counterpart, the IJmuiden High Lighthouse (35 meters), it forms a pair of leading lights that guide large cargo and cruise vessels safely from the North Sea into the North Sea Canal. The smaller lighthouse used to be taller but had to be made shorter because it needed a broader lighthouse. The top sections were taken off and are used as a separate lighthouse on the Island of Vlieland.