The armchair traveler

When you're a full-time resident of Cape Cod--tourist mecca of the Northeast--folks assume that your life is a year-round vacation, and to some extent that's accurate. The truth is, the most exciting place I've gone all summer is to Boston's Logan Airport to pick up our son visiting from Texas. Work, houseguests, the economy and a myriad of other obligations kept a vacation this summer out of the cards. Luckily our next-door neighbors, whose kids are out of school, married and self-sufficient, are more flexible--they just returned from a glorious cruise to Alaska!

To thank me for not killing their houseplants while they were gone, my neighbors brought back a terrific photo of a lighthouse for me. The photo above was taken as the cruise ship was leaving Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and heading north. But which lighthouse was it? The cruise ship social director didn't give a blow-by-blow commentary--my neighbor could only tell me where the ship was when the photo was taken. I went on an online search-and-discovery mission to find out which lighthouse it was: Point Atkinson! A new lighthouse for me, and the third Canadian lighthouse to be adapted to needlepoint, Point Atkinson will also be my first lighthouse in British Columbia.

More research will be necessary before I can design a canvas: I never paint a lighthouse design without several photos to go by, and I suspect the angle of this photo may not be suitable for my ornament format. I'll be back when I've found just the right photo to work from and have come up with a design!