we play in the sand

If you read the last post about vacation, you may have wondered why I was up at 4:00am to run in the dark on the last day.  Let's talk about that.  I have never enjoyed getting up early.  I hate alarm clocks.  My favorite thing about summer in school was begin able to sleep late.  My dad usually had other plans and would often wake me up by 8:00 or 9:00 just because he didn't think people should be sleeping so late.  I guess that's a whole other story but now I realize 8:00am isn't even early.  My favorite thing about teaching school now is that in the summer, I get to not set an alarm.  Yes, I am aware that most of my alarm setting has to do with my ridiculous running habit so it's totally my fault, but it's a calculated sacrifice I've made for the sake of my health and wellbeing.  That said, I set my alarm for 4:00am and I got up and ran in the dark.  Then I showered, loaded the car and Violet and I set out on a new adventure, driving south down the coast of South Carolina.  

One of my star former students, Katherine, had participated in the Piccolo Spoleto Sand Sculpture Contest in Charleston last year with a friend and told me that I should do it.  She told me about the "professional sculptors" who brought in complicated wood and plastic forms they used to pack the sand to make their big creations.  She told me it was very competitive and that while it was fun to participate, she wouldn't expect to win.  She invited me to make a team with her this year and so I casually mentioned it to two of my current sculpture students.  Who doesn't want a reason to go to the beach, right?  So they said yes and we had our team of 4 for the "adult" category.  You can make your own jokes about me being an adult.  I'll keep typing while agreeing with you.

Fate was unkind to Katherine on the very early morning of the event.  She had the longest drive of all of us on the event date and when she went to start her car, the battery was dead.  She was alone and pretty far away from everyone who would normally help her.  It was also 5:00am and she couldn't just go knock on doors to get help.  She had no choice but to tell us good luck and wish us the best without her.  This was a serious blow because Katherine is a multi-year veteran of the Sand Sculpture class I used to teach.  I was counting on her to help out a lot.  

I waited a while to break the news to my other teammates.  We're all pretty delusional, so we just figured we'd pick up the slack and work harder to make up for the loss of Katherine.  Elena (left) came down with her mom the day before and had a short drive to get to the Isle of Palms.  Cathryn (right) also drove down the day before with her mom and dad and they had already made a little vacation out of the event.  Cathryn's mom, Charis, is a hoot and she was quick with the team photos.  She even interviewed us for her podcast, Music Mamas On The Move, and did some video updates.  She's on Instagram and all the other media too.

These two know me pretty well at this point, but neither had ever met "Beach McAbee".  I'm not even sure this meeting counts because I had to be all business to help get this massive sculpture finished in the 3 hours we had for the contest.  Maybe they'll get to meet him one day.

Violet deemed herself our photographer and immediately sad down to tan, paying us almost no attention.  I kid a little.  She did a good job getting some of these action photos below.  And she only burned a little bit after we ran out of sunscreen.  It was an extra beach day for her and some needed rest after a busy vacation week.

It was hot.  My week long vacation during the previous 7 days had been unseasonably mild with low humidity.  One day I made a whole sculpture and barely even sweated at all.  On this day, I poured sweat.  

Cathryn and Elena were fast learners.  I gave them just a few preliminary instructions and we started work.  We piled up a big mound of sand and started the process of packing it down.  They shoveled a lot while I carried buckets of water from the receding tide.  Within the first hour, Elena had a burst blister on her hand.  She later earned another big blister on the same hand.  We were working.  Soon they were sketching out the composition and sculpting a giant octopus head and all the tentacles.

As I said in the last post, I don't normally make a plan for what I'll sculpt in sand.  With a team, it was necessary to at least plan a bit.  We had a starting idea and that idea pretty much went out the window in the first 15 minutes of the contest.  As a sculptor and professor, I wanted to make sure we had a great composition all the way around.  One of the judges came up to us when we started and told us it was more important to have one view for the judges.  Fine.  So we changed our idea completely.  We did focus more attention on one side, but we still had our artistic pride, so we also made sure it was an effective composition in the round. 

Based on Katherine's initial reports from last year, I had zero expectations beyond just making something in the time allotted.  I did not expect to actually compete or take home any awards.  I saw the team of 4 older adult men wheel all their wooden forms to the beach on a cart.  I watched them break out into 4 distinct work plans to get their idea finished.  I saw teams with blueprints and sketches.  I knew we were outclassed by more experienced sand sculptors and I focused my attention on teaching Elena and Cathryn the correct process and having a good time.  

About half way through the contest time, beach spectators started coming up to us and telling us how great our sculpture was.  We were all the way at the end of the line of competitors, so they had seen all of the entries by the time they got to us.  The first few comments, I just wrote off to people being nice.  But when the comments kept coming and a little crowd started gathering at our site, I started to wonder if we were actually being competitive.  Our team parents kept us up on the time and we finished our final touches with just a few minutes to spare.  We had finished a good sculpture on time and in my mind, we were successful, mostly because we all had fun.

After talking with the judges, we had some time to kill so we decided to walk through all the sculptures and see what others had made.  This is the one the 4 dudes made with all the wooden forms.  A dozen eggs, a sports car and the word "eggspensive".  You know that emoji with the guy with his arms up like "whatever"?  Yeah, that.  I mean, it's good, don't get me wrong, but it couldn't stand up to a sculpture critique.

This team made a massive drip castle.  The size was impressive, the drip part, not so much.  Also, not-so-interesting radial composition.  

This one I liked a lot.  The little LEGO guys were well done.  It was impressive in its skill level and while the composition was symmetrical and frontal, it was still satisfying.  It's tough to do vertical carving and those LEGO people were good.

So I wouldn't say I was very impressed by the other works in the adult category but there were some good builds.  A couple of teams did some impressively tall castles hoping to win the "architectural" category.  The categories were not easy to understand for me.  You could compete as a "kid", a "family", or an "adult team".  You could apparently win prizes in those team categories, but they also had a "Most Creative" category and a "Best Architectural" category.  I wasn't sure how all of it worked, so I just observed and learned.  

When they got to announcing the "Most Creative" awards, I was shocked to hear the name of our sculpture called out.  We won 2nd Place for Most Creative!

We got a little sand bucket and shovel filled with goodies.  There were three hats, a few gift cards and a few other items inside.  

Elena and Cathryn play it cool but I think they were happy about winning an award.  They should be super proud of their hard work and winning for their first ever sand sculpture.  Did I mention that?  This was the first time either of them had made a sand sculpture.  Pretty cool.

The egg guys?  They won "Best Overall" with their egg thing.  The drip castle won a big award too.  I think the LEGO team won something too and it may have even been a family who made that one.  That made it even more impressive.

Ours was a Kraken wrapped around a skull.  We were supposed to make a bird.  This turned out a lot better and gave us more options.  

We had all worked hard and sweated a lot.  I was dehydrated even after downing 3 bottles of water during the contest.  The whole gang decided to head up to the Windjammer for some food and beverages.  Oh, and Jencyn, Elena's roomate also came out to support us.  Sadly, we didn't get to talk to her much because of the race against time but it was cool to have her there with us.  She ate lunch with us too.  I accidentally got a photo with her head in the bottom left, but it's the only one I have so there it is.  

We packed up our stuff and left the beach.  Violet and I still had one more adventure ahead of us and we were exhausted and ready to be out of the sun.  After I agreed to add the sand sculpture contest on the end of our family vacation, I also realized that I needed to stay one more day in Charleston to save gas and pick up some artwork while I was already in town.  Violet and I drove to our hotel and got showers and then had a nice nap before going to Page's Okra Grill for a really great meal.  I'm pretty sure we were both asleep by 10:30pm.

 

a vacation, sorta

 
Our annual family beach vacation was last week and what a week it was.  We've had plenty of perfect beach vacations over the years with beautiful weather, no rain, great temperatures, awesome places to stay, beautiful views and lots of fun.  Keeping that in mind, along with the very awkward weirdness going on daily in our world and our country, I'm very grateful to have had the week we had.  And while I'm grateful to have had any vacation at all with family, I'm sure at least G would have wanted a couple of things to have been a little different.  So let's have a look at a few of the week's happenings by category:

Playing in the sand...

Yes, I'm a grown adult man and I still love playing in the sand.  I'm sure this seems weird to other adult men on the beach, but I think it's just as weird to stand in the sun fishing for Lord knows what or drinking your red belly larger by consuming all the cans of beer in sight while your evil spawn squeal and scream all day.  (Please note that where we have been staying the last several years, we don't have any of this nonsensical behavior.  Our beach neighbors were stellar, even the kids!  But I've seen it and it's one of the reasons we've continued to migrate south on the Grand Strand.)

My internal clock wakes me up early on vacation.  I don't understand it.  Maybe it's because I've always been very excited about going to the beach and my brain is so happy it just wants me to be up to enjoy everything.  Either way, around sun-up, I'm up and headed out for my run.  When I get back, I shower and have a nice little breakfast on the balcony.  Then I'm out on the beach early to beat the heat and I spend a few minutes (hours) playing by myself in the sand.  

The family trickles out on their own schedule and they take over the chairs and umbrella spots while I bask in the sun and make some sort of sand sculpture.  This involves shoveling a ton of sand and carrying 5 gallons of water from the ocean multiple times to pack the sand before I then stand awkwardly in front of the heap of sand trying to decide what I want to make.  Sure, I could plan ahead and probably save myself some time and embarrassment, but I'm on vacation and preparing feels more like work.  Then there's more moving of sand as I carve with my fingers and hands.  Sometimes I have to get the shovel back out and move a big chunk to another area because I didn't plan ahead, but in 2 or 3 hours, I'm washing the sand off my hands and taking a few photos.  

After the photos, I get to drink water, sit in the chair and relax for the rest of the day.  Most days I'll go in for lunch and from the balcony I'll notice people walking by and taking photos of whatever I made.  It's a nice feeling.  I'm sure some of them don't know exactly what it is or why it is, but they seem to smile and enjoy seeing it.  The last couple of years I've been signing them with my IG handle and sometimes I'll get nice messages and even a photo from strangers like the one above.  It's really nice when strangers go to some trouble to thank you for doing something like this.  

When we get to go back out on the beach in the evening, most often the sculpture is still there.  It's always nice when people like it enough to not destroy it.  Last week, we had the pleasure of recognizing some of the families from previous years and they felt comfortable talking to me about things.  A few asked if I was the guy from last year and some will ask me what I made on a certain day.  The truth is, I have no idea.  The days blur together on a good vacation and once I make them, I turn them over to nature and forget about them.  I understand that after that photo, they don't belong to me anymore.  

When we went out on our last night of vacation, we found this note on the back of my final sculpture.  It made me very happy.  Make no mistake, making these things is hard work.  I started the week thinking that I'd make maybe 4 sculptures.  I had a sand sculpture thing planned for the day after vacation and I didn't want to overdo it.  Oh, another fun little note is that Walter the crazy puppy dog somehow destroyed my pinky finger a week before vacation and it was still very swollen and painful when vacation started.  

Including this one, which is obviously not the best, I still made 6 sand sculptures during the week.  This one is what it is because the day started out rainy and we ditched the beach in favor of a day of shopping.  When the sun came out, I escaped the shopping and spent a couple of hours on the beach in the afternoon.  This one only took about 45 minutes.  So yeah, they're a lot of work, but there's also a lot of satisfaction knowing that you made someone smile when they saw it.  

Running like a crazy person...

My running insanity is well documented.  You know I run 3.1 miles every day.  One of my favorite things about vacation or travel is being able to run in new and beautiful places.  I mentioned we've stayed at this location before and one of my favorite things about it is it's proximity to Murrell's Inlet.  This little stretch of beach is the last bit before the big stone jettys and the inlet.  If you leave our little beach walkout and head south, you'll run just around the edge of the peninsula when you hit the 1.5 mile mark.  

Fewer humans go this far down so it's quiet and I'm often one of just two or three people out during this time.  The views there are almost other-worldly.  I often see dolphins in the ocean and all sorts of birds out looking for breakfast.  

The running is also cool, but it's the time alone out there with the surf and the sun rising that does it for me.  It's the best.  

Everyone in our family appreciates their own time and space.  We all know that during vacation, we're stuck a little closer than we want for a little longer than we want.  We love being together and we're a pretty tight family, but we need our space.  This is the time that keeps me from going off on the family on these trips.  It's so beautiful and so quiet.  I love it.  The running is also good for me, I guess.

We all have those moments when we question our life choices.  I've ran during some crazy and I do mean CRAZY times.  All sorts of weather conditions, including hurricanes on the beach and all sorts of weird times of day.  I've been up at 4:00am running before but each time I do something like that, I wonder if I'm really not well.  I don't have an answer on that just yet, but I do know that I had to get up at 4:00am on the last day of vacation.  The beach was so dark I couldn't run there, so I went out onto the street and ran the roads in the dark alone.  

You wanna go out in the ocean?...

We've taken our tandem kayak with us on our beach vacations for the last several years.  First, Blue and I would kayak the inlet and explore on a day when we had grown weary of sunburn.  Then Violet started loving the kayak and Blue took the opportunity to escape.  For the last couple of years, I've woke up one morning of vacation and looked out on a very calm and flat ocean from the balcony.  I've done my best on those days to talk one of the kids into going out into the ocean with me in the kayak.  They've always emphatically declined.  This year it was early in the week and I sent the text to Violet telling her I was going out in the kayak and asked if she'd like to join me.  As I was talking Blue into helping me carry the kayak out to the beach, she responded "yes".  

It was on.  Now, if you're not a kayaker, here's the significance of this:  Our kayak is an open kayak with no spray skirt.  This means it's just a little plastic boat that holds people.  Which means it also holds water.  So if something like a wave crashes over your boat, it fills with water and you sink.  Violet knows this well because once, a million years ago, Blue sank his kayak in a lake.  Thus her reluctance to go out in waves.  

Whatever made her say yes, I wasn't questioning it, I just went with it.  Blue and I dropped the kayak in the sand and I had Violet in a life jacket and holding a paddle before she could second guess herself.  I knew the biggest danger was getting out past the surf and I simply told her that when I said go, she needed to get in and start paddling fast.  She did, I followed quickly and we paddled as hard as we could...right into a breaking wave.  It crested right over Violet's lap and filled the kayak about half full of water.  We paddled a little more and we were safely in the open water.  I hadn't thought about bringing anything to bail water, so I used my hands to get a few gallons out.  

Apparently it was quite the show for those on the beach.  We were told that everyone was watching us and they all seemed surprised when we didn't topple over or sink.  We didn't really have a plan past getting out in the water, but we quickly decided to paddle down to the inlet and back.  We didn't see any dolphins but the view was incredible.  These photos and a couple of funny videos are from Blue on the shore.  When we decided to go back out in the ocean a second time, we grabbed an old disposable waterproof film camera and took it with us.  It was Violet's first time using a film camera and it was a little different from the ones I remember, so we'll see if we get any photos from that in the next couple of days.  On our second trip a few days later, we rode the waves into the shore and they kept crashing over the back of the boat before we could get out.  We were already beached but the boat filled with water and we had to get Blue to help us turn it over the dump the water out just so we could pull it ashore.  10/10 amazing experience.  Highly recommend and would do it again.  

Random family moments...

We've developed habits when we go to the beach.  After beach things in the sun during the morning and early afternoon, we all go inside and get cleaned up at various times.  Then we often head out to find food and visit some of our favorite places.  Violet and I usually walk a good bit to look for sharks teeth and to people watch but her hip injury kept the walking to a minimum this year.  We did accidentally walk to the inlet one day.

We all have different favorite places to eat and we spread those out through the week.  I love a good lobster roll and Violet loves a crab pot.  We always pick the place on the inlet that has both along with great views.  

The lobster roll is so good.  I can still taste the butter.  Mmmmmmm.

Part of the fun is walking around the inlet.  There's a Marsh Walk and a little pier.  Lots of pelicans around and I do love a pelican.  It's a beautiful place.

This was our first time seeing my brother's new place.  My brother owns The Tangled Web in Spartanburg and he's getting ready to open the second location in Surfside Beach.  We stopped by to see him and to see the new place.  Later in the week we got to have dinner with him and see his apartment.

We're always on the lookout for fun sunglasses and great mirrors for photos.  This was going to be a family portrait until Blue and G took off across the store.

It was a good trip for stranger photos.  Every time I walk by a photo booth machine, I check the bin to see if someone left a copy of their pics.  From the looks of my collection, most people do.  If you want to bring me some joy, be sure to leave one of your copies in the bin for me to find.  Or, if you happen to find some strangers' abandoned photos, send them my way.  

After the sand sculpting is done, this is my view for the rest of the day.  I've had enough sun at that point, so after lunch on the balcony, I settle into the shade of the umbrella for a nap or a long, quiet meditation.  I can just sit here and stare out into the waves for hours.  

I apparently do weird things in public.  When we took this photo in Drippy's Ice Cream, I noticed my head looked like the second scoop on Violet's cone.  

So I spent the next few minutes trying to recreate the idea with my own cone.  It was deceptively difficult to line it up.  The whole time, Blue was taking photos of me trying to take my own photo.  This led to a whole rabbit hole of a conversation about making stickers with photos and being able to drop them into text conversations.  That led to all of us trying to add stickers to the family group chat at once.  The activity locked up my phone and then Blue's phone.  Messed them up so bad we both had to delete the chat and shut down our phones.  

We've driven by this place for 15 years or more without ever trying it.  Last week we found out it also has a bakery inside, so we finally stopped and tried it.  It was amazing.  Tiramisu, cannoli, and all sorts of really great sweets.  We also tried a pizza and were impressed.

One of my favorite things about where we stay on vacation is the sunsets.  The sun goes down over the marsh and it's beautiful from our door.  Our week started out with an odd haze that hid the sunsets completely on the first couple of nights.  Then there were a few nights we were out later and missed the sunset.  There was a cloudy night.  Over the first several days, this was the only sunset I got to see over the lake at Broadway.  

But at the end of the week, I finally got my marsh sunset.  I know, it sounds like a perfect week and like I said at the beginning, I have no room to complain.  The part I left out was that our little brown dog Timmy started getting sick just before we left home.  His sickness worsened while the dogsitter was there and we got pretty worried about him.  So much so that G had to get up very early one morning and drive home with the intention of taking him to the vet.  She got him some medicine and he started to improve so she was able to come back to the beach the next day.  As soon as our worries started to fade about Timmy, the next report from the dogsitter was that now Walter was sick with similar symptoms.  A new medication was prescribed and luckily the dogsitter was able to pick it up without us driving back home again.  By the end of the week, we were exhausted from worry and the dogs were both exhausted from the sickness.  

But also, we're lucky to have those goofy dogs.  Even when they break your pinky finger and interrupt your beach vacation.  So there we are on our last night of vacation.  A little more tan, sort of rested, kinda tired and full of ice cream and cannoli.