Day 35 - Ocean Shores, WA - 3215 Miles

This weekend is the Sand and Sawdust Festival. LOTS of extra people in town. I prefer tourist places where we're the only tourists. We'll start with the sawdust. Lumberjack, macho, testosterone, artistic. Which of those words don't belong with the others. In this case, they all belong. I've always admired people with artistic ability. It's the one area where I'm completely lacking. OK - it's one of many areas I'm completely lacking. Chainsaws usually aren't listed among artist's tools, but they were in abundance here. If you ever go to one of these, take earplugs.

 

I Finally Found Them - Bigfeet

I commissioned a carving of me. I think he captured me perfectly, but the hat is way off.

Next the sand. There was a sand-sculpting competition on the beach. The plan was to start sculpting at 9am the various categories would be judged at 3:30 pm. We saw the start of the competition as part of our usual beach walk.

Let the Games Begin

We stopped back at around noon to check on the progress.

My Level of Sand Sculpture

Then we went back to the sawdust. At about 1:30 an announcement came over the PA, "If you want to see the sand sculptures, you should probably go down to the beach RIGHT NOW. The tide is coming in and the timing of the judging has been moved up." 








I had seen the schedule and it was pretty straight-forward - sculpt, judge, high tide washes everything away. The judging was scheduled for 3:30. I checked the tide tables on my phone (there's an app for that) and high tide was at 3:07. It didn't make sense to me but this was something like the 12th annual. It wasn't their first rodeo. Maybe they used a different app than I did, but it sounded like things were going south fast. We headed down to the beach.

Same Sculpture from Behind

 

Fighting a Losing Battle

There was judging for both the sand and the sawdust but to me the big winner, as he always is on event weekends, was OceanShores.mobi. He is the one who pulls vehicles out of the soft sand or those who, much like the planners of the sand sculpting event, misjudge high tide. We see him on the beach on these weekends just cruising around looking for cars stuck in the sand. He don't even bother waiting for calls.

There were a lot of people standing around talking about the trouble these two would be in, but the owners were no where in sight. This was still almost an hour before high tide. The FWD Subaru has a chance if the owner shows up quick, but the pickup is doomed.

The next exciting activity (not counting laundry on Monday) is our Alaskan cruise departing from Seattle on Tuesday.