Hi! I’m Debi, and I hope you will enjoy the photographs of lighthouses I’ve taken in the Great Lakes during the past several years. I live in Saginaw, the only city in Michigan without a natural lake, which has caused me to look forward in anticipation to my summertime vacations to the Great Lakes for sun, fun and the beach! As a child, we spent most of our summer vacations in the northern Lower Peninsula, near Burt Lake, picking Petoskey stones, and visiting the Mackinaw Bridge. I came to love Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, and have recently begun to notice lighthouses as I never had before as a child. As my attraction grew, I felt drawn to seek them out, walk their piers, to touch and photograph them. There are so many, and they are each so different! They have character, personality, and a story to tell. Their stories are unique and fascinating. And the best part, is that well over 100 of them are standing by the shores of the beautiful Great Lakes that I love so much.

And so, I began to drag my husband and six children, sometimes kicking and screaming, following Circle Tour signs in search of lighthouses on our annual family vacations. A couple of the children, at times, would sit in the car, cursing lighthouses, while the rest of us walked the sometimes treacherous piers in order to get close enough to a lighthouse to hug it! There is a soft spot in my heart for the memory of my then nine-year old daughter, Emily, hugging the Little Sable, and promising it that she would return. Because of that, I frequently give a lighthouse a "little pat" just for Emily.

There were the lighthouses we never did find because the directions were sketchy, and the ones that disappointed us because, without a boat, we could never hope to see them up close. There were also ones like Port Washington in Wisconsin that scared the pants off me because I never did enjoy walking on a very narrow, bumpy pier with no side rails for safety! And, most exciting, there are the lighthouses I have yet to see, and dream of visiting, both in the Great Lakes area and elsewhere in the world.

In the future, I hope to venture a little further away from Michigan, Canada and Wisconsin and see some of the lights on the east coast. My husband and I have a list of areas we'd like to visit, including Cape Cod, South Carolina, Maine and parts of eastern Canada.