It’s hard to describe the experience of Sandcastle Day on Cole Road Beach. Ryan Schenk, Tom, and Mykal had driven out to meet me in Cape Cod on Saturday evening. After a fitful sleep, I arose at 5:00am. Tom and Mykal were sleeping in a little, but Ryan Schenk and I headed out the door ready for action.
Unfortunately, the tide wasn’t quite ready. Cole Road Beach is uniquely shallow. As a result, when the tide goes out… it GOES out. Probably a quarter mile off shore. This provides plenty of sand for castle building. The strategy is placing the castle close enough to the shore so that you get the most amount of building time, but far enough off shore that the tide will easily slaughter the castle once it’s built.
I didn’t time our beach arrival quite right. We showed up about an hour early. Here’s a picture of Ryan Schenk sad that we’d have to wait to begin construction.
After a trip to Hole in One Doughnuts for transcendental doughnuts, we came back to the beach and BAM! The Tide was at the ready!
Official ground breaking went down at 6:50am. We shoveled for 5 hours and then began carving. Originally the plan was to make a tall castle with a single elongated peak, but after discussions we thought a dual peak would look cooler. Tom and Mykal showed up shortly after we began to contribute – sadly they had to leave before the castle was complete. Dad D came by as the castle was coming together to complete his time honored task of building the official castle wall.
Here’s the construction time lapse:
AWESOME.
To celebrate the castle’s completion, Ryan Schenk and I performed two epic high fives, both of which are chronicled here in this animated gif. Apparently, today’s post is very animated.
You can see the water fast approaching the seaside fortifications during our high five!!
OH MAN. STAY TUNED.
Tomorrow, the castle goes down!
The time lapse came out awesome! Can’t wait for the destruction tomorrow, it sucks that we missed it (we made it off the cape with less than 10 minutes of bridge traffic, huge score for leaving early).
Did you guys use glue like the pros? The animation was pretty rad!
We do not use glue. This year it was a rush to complete the carving as the tide was fast approaching. I’d say we finished carving with only about a half hour to spare.
So… it didn’t have to last very long.