come vacation with me

After our intense morning of sand sculpting for the Piccolo Spoleto Competition in Charleston on Saturday, Violet and I got in my car with full bellies and heavy eyelids and headed up highway 17 towards Garden City Beach.  With the shoveling and sculpting behind me, a week of vacation was ahead.

We arrived to meet the rest of the family at the condo just around time to eat again.  Perfect timing.  

The place we like to stay in Garden City has gorgeous back porch views of the inlet and the sunset.  For the last few years, we've made it a daily priority to try to catch the sunset over the marsh.  The weather forecast for our vacation week indicated that this might be a tough week for clear skies.  Still, we got a little color on that first evening.

Balcony coffee is better than porch coffee.  The beach makes all the difference.  I got up without an alarm and ran on the beach.  The wind was insane.  Steady 20 mph winds and gusts higher.  It didn't look like it was going to be a good beach day.

Instead of lounging in the sun all morning, we had a bundled up beach walk in the wind.

...and then we went to some of our favorite cheesy area stores.

This was sunset on Sunday.  Bummer.  But, I will admit that it was nice to have a day off from shoveling and sculpting after Saturday.  

Monday morning I got up and ran in steady rain powered by a strong wind.  It was kind of a miserable run, but it was a run on the beach and because of that, it was gorgeous.  I waited out the rain and as soon as it stopped, I went out on the beach to begin sculpting.  It was already afternoon at this point, but I was happy to be out in the sand and even happier that it stopped raining.  I hate rain.  

The family joined me on the beach and as soon as they arrived, the clouds and rain came back.  With the radar threatening heavy rain, they ditched me.  I needed to refine the skeleton arm if I was going to be proud of this one, so I just kept working as the light rain fell.  Within a few minutes, the rain stopped and the sun came out.  I was able to take my time and finish this one and I was happy with it.  

Of course, the clouds came back in time for sunset.  

The weather returned to a more normal beach pattern on Tuesday.  It got hot.  As I mentioned in the previous post, I'm not much of a planner when it comes to sand sculpture.  I just go out and do whatever seems right at the moment.  Monday's skull was still mostly there on Tuesday morning, so I just piled a bunch of sand on it and a pelican came out.  

I had a lot of beach friends come out on Monday when I finished the first sculpture.  Many were friends I made over the last few years and our beach weeks just happen to overlap each year.  Some stay in the same condo as us and some are just nearby neighbors.  Everyone was so kind all week.

  

Violet and I walked to the point after I finished the sculpture and had a nap.  This was the first day we could make it on dry sand.  

I think we just missed this one.  It was cloudy but I think we could have caught some glimpses of color but we were a few hours too late and we just couldn't skip ice cream.

Fun fact about the beach:  Everything is closed on Monday.  When it was raining on Monday morning, we tried to go to a lot of the places we like to wait out the rain.  At least three of them were closed.  One was the Tie Dyed Coffee Bean.  We wanted to support them, though, so we made time to go back on Wednesday.  Good coffee, cool vibes.  

Oh, and my brother's comic shop, Tangled Web is open in Surfside this summer.  They have a lot of cool stuff, even if you're not into comics.  They're open on Mondays.  Put it on your beach list.

Wednesday was the part of the week when we all forgot what day it was.  I decided to take it easy and work small.  The tide was eating every bit of sand I left overnight, so every day it was like starting over.  I opted to make a very small dog and in my mind it was going to be about 4 feet long, about the size of the head of the dog pictured above.  As you can see, that didn't work out and I just kept adding sand and kept adding dog.  It got huge.  This was the biggest one I made all week.  It was pretty good, though.  

I noticed people were destroying the sculptures before the tide got to them.  That's cool with me, but there was a little boy who found me the next day and reported to me that when they were out on Wednesday night as a family and saw that some little boys walked on parts of the dog.  He and his siblings rushed over and spent an hour fixing the parts that were damaged.  It was so sweet.  Of course, the next morning lots of people had jumped on it and completely leveled it, but that's part of the fun of ephemeral sculpture.  

My reward for finishing a sculpture is a cool drink and a beach nap.  This might have been the first day the whole family stayed out together for a long time.  

We did all of the regular touristy things at night.  Broadway has a new haunted book shop.  Edgar Allen Poe themed, I guess.  He was stationed at Fort Moultrie for a bit, so we claim him as our own down here.  Maybe this was Anabelle Lee?  I wasn't really paying attention.

I checked all the photo booths several times and this is the only orphaned photo I found all week. 

Cross country summer mileage began on June 1 and so did Violet's real return to running.  She's had a tough recovery from last August's hip surgery, but she's making her comeback now.  This meant I got a few extra miles during vacation week.

Violet and I got to kayak around the inlet on Thursday and during that adventure, we got a special treat.  Side story time!

There's a "pirate ship" in the inlet that takes kids and parents out on a pirate adventure.  We've never done it, but we have observed it from the water a few times on our own adventures.  They have pirate ladies who teach the kids cool pirate songs and teach them how to do pirate attacks.  They have water cannons on the sides of the ship and during the voyage, they get to attack the evil Pirate Pete.  Pirate Pete is sleeping in a small boat in the inlet (for reasons we do not know from a distance) and the pirate ship sails up and attacks Pirate Pete with water cannons.  Pirate Pete fights back with a Super Soaker but eventually lies down in his boat and "dies".

 

We were able to see Pirate Pete anchor his boat in the inlet not far from our kayak and then we saw the ship sailing in for the attack.  The pirate kids sang sea shanties and then manned the cannons for two drive by waterings.  When Pirate Pete lost, he laid down "dead" in the boat and the big ship sailed away victorious.  

As they sailed away, we watched Pirate Pete discretely remove his pirate coat.  Then he took off a rain suit.  Then we realized that Pirate Pete was not a dude.

Pirate Pete was actually a beautiful young lady in a bikini and when the pirate ship was far enough away, she pulled out her phone, relaxed and got some sun.  It was hilarious to us.  After a few minutes, Pirate Pete took a bucket and dumped the extra water out of his boat and then chugged back to port.  "He" grabbed some clothes out of a bin on the dock and by the time the big ship came back in, Pirate Pete had turned into one of the cool pirate lady hostesses and she welcomed the kids and parents back to shore.  I guess, let's just keep this between us.  I don't want Pirate Pete to get in any trouble or any kids to see behind the curtain.

We took pictures of things other than Pirate Pete.  This guy was getting fish tossed at him from a boat that returned from the ocean.

This guy was very photogenic but he didn't like us getting too close to him.

One of our traditions is that Violet and I get our favorite seafood after we kayak in the inlet.  Crab for her and the hot lobstah roll for me.  Oh my goodness it was sooo perfect.

We felt like we missed too much beach time with the early week weather, so Violet and I made plans to be back on the beach as soon as our seafood was devoured.  I decided the sand sculpture machine would be closed on Thursday.

It was very hot, but otherwise gorgeous all day.  We all got some afternoon beach time and relaxed.  

The sand though, it called to me.  I couldn't just leave it alone.  I took 5 minutes to make this little heart and it was so funny to hear how many people noticed it and loved it the next day.

We got to have dinner with my brother and his wife around sunset that night.  We finally got our sunset view.

The food was good but the view was better.

An update on the UFO house:  Blue and I have always wanted to trespass and see if we could see inside.  I've read about the interior and I really want to see it for myself.  For a few years it seemed abandoned behind a fence and locked gate.  Last year some people came in during our vacation week and stayed.  This year, the same thing happened.  Several cars appeared, they cut the grass and hung out.  No trespassing for us again this year.

Friday was our last beach day.  I took it sort of easy with this one and kept it simple.  Working fast gave me more beach chair time.

I think we've mastered the last day of vacation.  We were able to get in all the things we wanted to do and eat and still get home before midnight.

We're lucky to have a great dogsitter.  The dogs love her and this year they didn't get sick or act crazy.  We missed them, though, and it was nice to get to see them again.  

Because of the general timing of everything leading up to vacation and the schedule of events planned for the week after, I did have to break down and do some actual work on the computer.  There was some student advising issues to handle, a FedEx return label for a couple of sculptures and a few emails I had to send.  I was able to do those on a rainy morning so that was fine.  

I took a book to read, you know, with all my extra vacation time, and managed to make it through only one chapter.  I sketched a little, but mostly I made sand sculptures and rested on the beach between meals.  It was nice.  

I didn't get to surf and I'm bitter about it.  We had strong rip current and no swimming warnings for most of the week and then we had no waves.  Bummer.

At the moment, I don't have any other vacations planned for this summer.  If you'd like to take me to the beach, let me know.  I'll bring the surfboard.

 

we played in the sand again...

Last year was the first time I had ever participated in the Piccolo Spoleto Sand Sculpture Competition in Charleston, SC.  You can find a post about that by scrolling to last June.  This year, our team agreed to regroup and spend the day having fun again.

This year's event fell on the Saturday before my family vacation instead of the Saturday after.  Cathryn and Elena worked in some short family vacations around the event again this year.  Katherine also got a little break from everyday life by going down a day early.  Violet and I did the same, we just did it with a week's worth of luggage, a kayak and a surfboard loaded in with all the sand sculpture supplies.  We all assembled from our various locations on Front Beach on The Isle of Palms and got ready for battle.

This is us with our battle faces on.  Elena can't take a "mean mug" photo to save her life.  Catch her on a random Tuesday and she'll be giving you the most evil eye by accident, but ask her to mean mug and she instantly starts laughing and smiling.  Luckily, the faces weren't as important as the sculpting skills and these ladies are some of the best sculptors I know.

First, some background about the weather.  It started raining in my area about two weeks before the event and my rotation of running shoes almost never dried out.  The daily threat of rain continued as we drove down to Charleston and the forecast for the morning of the competition was for heavy rain and storms.  The night before the event, the organizers sent out an email warning that if lightning was in the area, the event would be canceled.  When I got up to run, there was no cancelation email and no rain, so I was very happy.

Katherine was the original organizer of our team and she's a meticulous planner.  I am the opposite of a meticulous planner, at least on the surface.  I actually do a lot of planning and thinking through ideas, but I do it in a way that makes sense for my brain and my knowledge of my limitations.  I also keep all of it to myself.  Still, these two opposing planning forces usually work together well to bring us right into the middle of those two extremes.  Katherine kept teasing me, asking in the group chat if I had a sketch for everyone yet.  Well, the night before the event, sitting on a hotel bed, I drew and sent this one:

After viewing the entries last year, I wanted us to go for scale and make something big.  I joked with Elena that we should make a giant portrait of her step dad Gene.  That got me thinking about doing a human head since none of the entries were attempting anything like that last year.  It was last minute-ish, but it was a plan and a sketch.

The first step is always to pile up a lot of sand.  We spent about an hour shoveling sand, packing sand, and hauling 5 gallon buckets from the ocean and pouring the water over the packed sand.

With only two hours left in the competition, we began sculpting.  I started trying to lay out the face and the rest of the team began working on the much larger area that would become the flowing hair of the sand princess we were making.  

I was really concerned that we might be cold during the competition.  I've been stuck on the beach making sculptures in rainy conditions before and your body can get quite cold.  Since the rain never showed up, the temperatures stayed higher and the humidity was like a big, wet blanket making us all very warm and very sweaty.

Carving faces is not something I do very often and it's very difficult to make your brain understand that you have to keep digging out areas deeper and deeper.  It seems counter-intuitive as you're working and you have to be really bold.  Being bold in sand means a high level of risk.  This kind of risk on a very public beach is a very public risk.  The last thing I wanted was for the whole face to fall off because I was being dumb.  We all did a good job with the packing, though, so the face didn't fall off, even when I kept digging out around the eyes and nose.

In our pregame discussions, we had some ideas for turning the locks of hair into snakes or mermaid tails.  Because we knew we were taking a big bite with the very large scale, we agreed to prioritize the face and hair before worrying about details like snakes or tails.  

This proved to be a wise choice as we started to run out of time before all the hair strands were even in existence.  There were about 30 minutes of manic shoveling and sculpting just to get everything to a finished state before the competition ended at noon.  We were rushing and sweating, but we still used our final seconds to rake out the area and add a title and some musical notes.

As soon as time ran out, we all went for a cool off in the ocean.  It felt sooooo nice.  

While we didn't have Jencyn as one of our good luck charms this year, we did have Violet and we had Cathryn's parents again.  We also had Elena's mom, Tesa again.  This year we added Elena's step dad, Gene, who provided some comic relief while we worked.  I got tickled after we got out of the ocean when Gene asked Elena to take his photo with our finished sculpture.

It was nice to have Katherine with us this year.  She helped us be able to make such a large sculpture in 3 hours.  It's kinda funny because we usually butt heads in the beginning of a project, but after that, we work together pretty well.  Our fussing is usually entertaining to others.

After our dip in the ocean, we walked around and checked out the competition.  There were some really good family teams and some really talented kids making sculptures this year.  When we talked to the judges, they asked us our team name.  We told them we were "The Hot Metal Beaches".  I eventually had to explain the team name to some journalists by saying that these ladies were my current and former students who also just happened to be exceptional metal sculptors.  Then we gathered around the tent for the awards presentation.

We were announced as winning second place overall!

This was our finished sculpture...

...and a closer view of the sculpture and the award sign...

...and our award ribbon that will go with our ribbon collection in my office.

Then it was past time for lunch!  Working very hard for 3 hours had us all very hungry so we got to the Windjammer as soon as we possibly could.  

We were past "hangry" and very close to delirious at this point.  I hope she'll forgive me for posting this photo but I absolutely love making Elena laugh this hard.  There are no photos of the food because it was devoured immediately.  The grouper was amazing, but again, I was famished.

I said earlier that these ladies are some of the best sculptors I know.  I realize it's easy to dismiss such a comment as just being kind and praising my students and friends.  I'm a nice guy, but I'm not that nice and I don't lie about art.  Let me provide some evidence to support my claims:  Katherine is the most decorated (awarded) art student in Lander University history, racking up many national level exhibits and awards while she was still a student.  Her success has continued since earning her MFA, continuing to win national awards, getting her work accepted into prestigious exhibits and having solo shows.  Cathryn earned Best In Show in our student exhibit last year for her sculpture and recently won 1st Place overall in a regional collegiate exhibit for her steel sculpture.  Elena also has some regional awards for her work and just last week won Best In Show in a national juried exhibit of metal work in Virginia.  All three of them had steel sculptures accepted into that exhibit (Katherine had two accepted!).  So, like I said, some of the best sculptors I know.  It seems I was lucky to be on a sand sculpture team with them, huh?  

They're also a lot of fun to be around.  Mama B took some "after" photos for us to go with our "before" photos at the very top of this post.  

This one is how we felt emotionally after working so hard and winning a major award.

And this is how we felt physically after working so hard and winning a major award.  I can't adequately describe how tiring something like this is.  Sand is heavy and we piled it 5 feet high.  5 gallon buckets of water are heavy and we hauled so many of those from the ocean and dumped them on the sand.  Then there was the relentless stomping on the sand with our feet and carving it away with our hands.  We were absolutely exhausted, but our goal for the day was to have fun and we definitely had fun.

And then for reasons I can't explain, we needed to go have our photo made with a yellow flamingo.

With a crew this fun, it was tempting to stick around with them longer.  They had plans to go to thrift stores and have dinner together.  By this time, though, it was after 3:00 pm and Violet and I were late for vacation!  We said our goodbyes and started driving up the coast to meet the family in time for dinner.