Sculpting Sand & Polar Vortexes

The cold is breaking.

Where I live in Edmonton, Canada, a small city of about a million people in the middle of the Canadian prairies, it gets cold. Yet, even a stretch of brutal chill is mostly unusual. A polar vortex as they called it, where we’ve not had a day this month where the temperatures have been warmer than minus twenty degrees, has given us a February locked in our houses avoiding the bone-chilling cold even while we’re locked in our houses avoiding the pandemic.

But it is supposed to warm up today. A little. Minus twelve, the forecast promises.

Still, I’ve been dreaming of warmer places.

for whatever one photo is worth:

A few years ago, we spent ten days in Maui.

Exploring.

Eating good food.

Playing on the beach.

Maybe it was because sitting on a beautiful beach in Hawaii is such the opposite of where I am now, land-locked in a frozen city, I saw this picture and I was pleasantly reminiscent of tropical vacations on this particular Travel Tuesday.

The quality of this photo was not brilliant, but was one of dozens I took with my sun soaked sports camera after spending a hours snorkelling in the reefs, playing in the waves, and building elaborate sand castles.

The sand castles were my particular favourite. Between my then-nine-year-old daughter and I we would construct elaborate buildings, tiny temples, and sprawling relic-inspired courtyards with the collection of plastic sand tools we’d bought at the local ABC Store. And as we dove back into the salt water we would watch from afar to see how many people would stop to look or even take photos of our creations.

We can’t travel now.

And it’s far too cold to turn the crispy snow in our front yard into similarly elaborate snow sculptures, if only because the snow doesn’t stick in those conditions.

Yet, it doesn’t hurt to look through old photos and remember long ago vacations and wonder how and when we might spend our next day at the beach…

How would you spend a day on the beach?

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