Turn a redder shade of pale

Yesterday, apparently I joined the entire city of Corpus Christi on a 2.5-mile stretch of beach on North Padre Island. That was the site of the 30th annual C-Sculptures event Saturday. A combination of beach, sand sculpting, live music and lots of people. When you're still relatively new in a town and experiencing events for the first time, it's hard to know much about the annual events and if they're worth attending. My general rule is that any event where you can be barefoot and half-dressed and not be in the minority is bound to be a fine time indeed. So I headed out just after lunch Saturday. On any normal day, I could leave my apartment and be standing in the ocean in less than 20 minutes. On this day, I was still in my car an hour and 20 minutes later. It's kind of hard to get to the beach when all the access roads are closed and the police are wandering around the roads looking confused. It was easy to blame them at the time, and I did. But I had no idea.

I mentioned earlier that I joined the entire city of Corpus Christi at the beach. And I wasn't exaggerating that much. If I told you there were 30,000 people on the couple of miles of beach yesterday, you'd probably envision a pretty crowded time. Well, 30,000 was only the number of people who camped out on the beach the night before for the event. Police estimated there were 100,000 people on the beach at any given time throughout the day. It became so crowded that police shut off beach access roads and turned people away. They estimated that as many as 250,000 people tried to attend this one day event. Considering the city has roughly 280,000 people, that's a pretty high attendance rate. Upon discovering that, police were absolved from any responsibility in the traffic gridlock.

And traffic gridlock is exactly what we experienced. That's what happens when you try to filter that many cars through a few access roads when everyone is trying to leave. So instead of getting caught up in that, I hung out on the beach while the crowds thinned. Not a bad alternative to idling in a row of cars. Except when you don't prepare your skin for that sort of exposure. I'm usually religious about sunscreen application. But I didn't make provisions to reapply. And so now, in the days after, I still get to lay around barefoot and half dressed, but that's mainly because my shoulders don't like the feel of anything other than aloe and lotion for the time being.