Castles and Dragons

Now - if we'd encountered any Dungeons along our trip, the title of this post would have been much [cough] cooler. My apologies to the D&D fans...

As it turns out the annual Sand Castle competition was happening this weekend in Cannon Beach. Now I think they use the word 'castle' very loosely here as you can see from the photo at the left. I don't know about you out there, but when I build sand castles at the beach - they look nothing like the works d'art we saw. I think Sand Sculptures might be more apropos. The event started at 5:30 am when the tide was low. We were down at the beach around 11:30 & most entries were near completion. The sculptures stay up until the high tide returns around 5-ish this afternoon.

This entry was named "Temple of Bloom" - perhaps a combo of the latest Indiana Jones & Pirates of the Caribbean flicks? The figure on the right reminded me of the octopus/squid creature in the last Pirates movie. I'm so terrible - I can't even remember the darned character's name.

How about this creation: "Frank n Stein" - These Oregon people are so punny. Perhaps that's why I like it here. Except for the eternal rain - it's no secret why it's so green here. I mean - take a look at this:

The branches are covered in moss. Now - I'm no Dendrologist (a scientist who studies trees - I had to look that up), but dang - I think that's darned hard evidence that it's wet here a lot of the time. Karen insists that the rain and extremely cloudy weather they've been having is a bit unusual. Oh well - we'll get plenty of sun & heat when we get down to CA.

We returned to Portland so we could watch Ross compete in the 20th annual Dragon Boat Races. As many of my friends know, I was on the Rowing Team (or Crew) for UCSD from '89 - '93 (we were the Pacific Coast Lightweight 4 champions) so I find rowing of any sort to be interesting. I was the coxswain which meant due to my small size (and loud voice) I sat in the stern (back) of the boat, steered the boat, and yelled at the rowers to row harder & faster. (I don't like to call it yelling - I prefer to call it persuading/encouraging them very loudly - not far off from high school teaching, really) The Dragon Boat Races are similar except there are far more rowers (like 16??) and face the direction they are going. In crew - the max. number of rowers is 8 and the coxswain is the only person who faces the direction the boat is traveling. Probably a good thing since this person is also steering the boat. In Dragon Boat racing, it looks like glorified canoe paddling - rowers use their upper body to propel the boat while w/crew the entire body is used - made capable by sliding seats. The course for Dragon Boat racing is also much shorter - not quite sure, but Ross' team completed the course in 2 minutes & 45 seconds. A speedy women's crew rows for 2000m in approx. 7 minutes.

For the soccer buddies back home - here's a video of Ross making the winning flag grab for his team today. His team won both their heats today, so they continue in some capacity tomorrow. Finally - a reason to use one of the gazillion video DH takes w/our camera.

**Edited at 9:00 pm - YouTube is not cooperating w/the video upload. I'll add the video when I can.**

And lastly - I leave you w/a quick photo of me & Mags rockin' out at RUSH concert #2. I totally nabbed this photo from her blog - Thanks Mags! Great time!!


Celtic Braid Sock Update: At heel flap of sock #1. :0)