Taking the Engineer to the Beach

We’ve just come back from a week’s holiday down the coast and I have to say that we had a ball. Whenever we pack to go away on holidays, I am always guilty of accusing Caroline of packing the entire house into our trailer.

This time as we were about to go, I decided to throw in a garden shovel. After all, I figured if we were going to the beach and I was going to have to build sand castles, I was going to be prepared.

It turned out that I was one of two dad’s (out of four) that had the same idea and it did indeed prove to be useful. Somewhere along the way, the kids got the idea that we should dig ‘baths’ in the sand and given that we had a couple of shovels, this was a hell of a lot easier to achieve than it would have been by hand.

It was whilst I was digging one of these ‘little baths’ that I took particular note of the consistency of the sand. The day prior I’d built a substantial sand castle simply by piling sand endlessly on the top. At the end of the day I thought that had I piled it higher, I could have sheared off the sides with the shovel and produced a more castle-like structure as opposed to the mountainous one that I had before me.
So as I dug a bath for the kids I noted the way that I was able to slice the sand and thought, “These slabs are almost like bricks.” And it was at that point that the engineer in me took over.


Finishing the bath, I started to cut sand bricks from the beach and build my sand castle. It was an experiment to see just how substantial it could be. In the end, after several hours of toil, I had a castle that was about as square as Emily was tall and half her height, with a wide and deep moat to protect it.


And it was indeed substantial. Strong enough that yours truly was able to stand upon it without inflicting any damage upon it!

Of course, having built this masterpiece, I wanted the chance for my little girl to get to be Princess Emily on the castle and had to stand guard as she’d been asleep for most of the construction period (it was safer that way … less unhelp at hand).
I managed to preserve it long enough for that to happen, but the kids did in the end (there was another 10 or so in addition to our own) start the demolition well ahead of the power of the sea. It was of course satisfying to see them run up and stand on it before moving on … with the castle still standing.



I guess you never quite stop being an engineer.