Neptune Festival 2008-Sand Sculpture!

Virginia Beach hosted the 35th Annual Neptune Festival, featuring the East Coast Sand Sculpture contest September 26-28th.

Last year was my first time attending the festival. There is something for everyone. The boardwalk comes alive and is lined with arts and crafts of all kinds. There is live music playing all day and into the night-beach music, blues, reggae, country, disco-all kinds of music. There is a carnival with a ferris wheel and a big slide for kids. There is food and drink and there is the sand sculpting competition.

There are different divisions in the sand sculpting contest. Masters/professionals that compete for cash prizes. Sand sculptors from all over the world. They also have a division for amateurs-freelance and business.

This year I made up my mind that I was going to enter and compete in the freelance division. I was doing it for fun and to overcome a fear. I asked my best friend Amy if she would help. Of course she would and she did. Our theme... Virginia is for Cat Lovers. She would carve out the letters and I would work on making sand cats everywhere. The competition started at 8am on Sunday-an alarm signaling to all participants to begin. We had 6 hours to complete the sculpture and we finished up at 1:23pm-just a tad ahead of the 2pm deadline.

We had so much fun making the sculpture, learning and pushing our limits, working together and all the while folks strolling past asking questions, taking pictures, and admiring our efforts.

The whole weekend was a blast. Saturday morning started with the Neptune parade and later that night a spectacular fireworks display. We all had so much fun and were loving life for sure!