Peak Experiences

Sometime in the next week or so, we are likely to welcome the peak number of guests in a day, here at the Harbour Town Lighthouse. It is the season when parents as well as children are enjoying that sensation that says, “School’s out.” Summer vacation is the impulse behind the way many see Hilton Head Island as a summer resort – when, in fact, spring and fall offer gentler weather, and winter, too, has its charms.

“School’s out” is such a fine feeling that even folks blessed with long and lovely lives still recall looking forward to it – noticing the calendar on the classroom wall beginning sometime in March and bursting forth onto the schoolyard with more than even the usual exuberance on that day when the last class lets out.

Barely a Beginning

Even such a fine feeling as that is merely the background for the peak experiences of life that people share stories about, when they make return visits here to the lighthouse. There is something about this spot on the planet that fosters peak experiences for so many, that millions of folks make their way back here from time to time.

A first kiss, an engagement, and even some of the most distinctive and memorable destination weddings take place here at the lighthouse. Inspirations for enterprise, too, emerge right here, and fortunes have been made from the feeling of unlimited opportunity that strikes an entrepreneur, when she stands om the spot where one of the world’s first nature-friendly resorts was founded, feeling the alliance and synthesis of humankind and the glorious environment with which we are surrounded here.

More than the View

It must be more than the incomparable view that prompts so many life-changing realizations, as those that take place ere at the Harbour Town Lighthouse every single week of the year. Sunsets and vast vistas of the marriage between sea and land that lies at the foot of the lighthouse – a coastline so uniquely enmeshed between sea and shore that we wonder sometimes how anyone ever drew the first map, the tides change the boundary so continuously through the day, the month, and the season.

Could it be the heritage of inspiration, the fact that so many ingenious solutions for both enjoying and preserving this beauty occurred to people right here on this spot? Could it be the truce, the treaty, the feeling that here a person can let his guard down and just breathe the beauty in? Could it be the company of residents and repeat visitors who demonstrate with their every expression and gesture that here is a place for pure enjoyment?

Many tell us that it begins with the hospitality, the gracious example of welcome they experience from Lighthouse Keeper Nadia Wagner, a welcome that demonstrates acceptance, peace, and gratitude right now, in the present moment, from the moment you approach the Lighthouse door. Won’t you please stop by and say hello? We never tire of sharing the many kinds of peak experience that people discover here.