The Point Bonita Lighthouse is 2 Hours From Sacramento

There is no escaping the extreme heat in Sacramento unless one leaves town. All this week, the forecast is for temperatures above 100 degrees. Granted, it’s a dry heat, but it’s still blazing hot all the same. That’s why it was so enjoyable yesterday on our way back to Sacramento after a lovely weekend in Sausalito to take a detour and discover a hidden gem: the Point Bonita Lighthouse in the Marin Headlands.

Imagine the cool wind blowing across your face and through your hair. Imagine not thinking about what goes down must come back up. Imagine the trail, which is almost a straight shot down to the newly restored bridge that leads to the lighthouse, after it winds a path through a hand-dug tunnel covered in algae. It doesn’t seem like the 1/2 mile, which the National Park Service says it is, yet you know in your head, your aching feet and panting lungs coming back up the hill that it is almost twice that distance. If you were standing, say, a 1/2 mile away from the Lighthouse when you measured the distance, it would be a 1/2 mile, but it is NOT a 1/2 mile from the parking area. It never is.

I suggested to my scoffing husband that he count his steps. All 5,280 of them. Because a 1/4 mile is 3 city blocks. A 1/2 mile is 6 city blocks. If each block is 40-feet wide, and a city block contained about 10 houses, that would equal 400 feet of distance, because 10 houses x 40 feet is 400 feet per city block. You take 400 feet x 6 blocks and that equals 2400 feet or just under 1/2 of a mile. I didn’t walk by 60 houses to get to that lighthouse. No sirree, it was more than 100 houses. And I know my houses because I am a Sacrament real estate agent.

But today I would give anything to be sitting on the deck at the Point Bonita Lighthouse. Gazing at rocks dotted with sleeping sea lions and at the city of San Francisco, wrapped, no doubt, in fog.

Photos: Elizabeth Weintraub