by pankaj | Mar 12, 2022 | Vacations & Leisure
Step-by-step instructions to build an impressive sandcastle with your family and friends on the beach.
Summertime is great for fun activities with friends and family. Of course, there are many activities to pursue with those you love, but building a sandcastle can be a favorite at the beach. Here are four simple stages to building a great sandcastle, plus some tricks.
Step 1: Gather Materials for your Sandcastle
The Obvious: As with every sandcastle, you will need tons of sand and water. The sand is the medium for sculpting, which will not cooperate without water to smooth it out and hold it together. In addition to this, you will need shovels and buckets to shape the sand the way you wish and to make it easier to lift and move. Make sure you bring a couple of different sizes and shapes for stylistic purposes.
The Not-So-Obvious: After the primary building of the sandcastle is done, you can use almost anything to decorate the outside of the castle. Things lying on the beach make incredible decorations, such as feathers, shells, coral, and driftwood. Other than these, you can bring different tools to add texture to the castle later. Everyday things such as kitchen tools and paintbrushes make fantastic tools.
Step 2: Pile on the Sand
Before you even pick up a bucket or shovel, you have to choose a place for your sandcastle along the beach. Keep an eye on the tide. The water destroying a half-finished sandcastle is the worst.
If you are making an intricate sandcastle with an idea for more of a sculpture instead of an architectural project, it may be easier to start with one giant pile of sand. Pour water onto the pile of sand until it is packed down and easy to work with. Don't worry about pouring too much water because any excess will drip through. The wetness of the sand makes it sturdier and gives it smoothers lines. You may now continue carving your sandcastle as you choose.
However, there is the possibility that you are not a sculptor and that you want to build a regular old sandcastle on the beach. In this case, start with a base of sand that you want to be the center. The buckets that you have brought are perfect for making this base. When you put water into a bucket, you want it medium wet. It can't be too dry that it doesn't hold shape, but not too wet that the sand doesn't budge from the bucket when you turn it over. Buckets can build impressive constructions like the castle's towers and walls. There are many buckets out on the market with ridges and designs for decoration. Makes sure these are entirely packed with sand before you flip your bucket or they will appear cracked and not all there.
Step 3: The Moat
It is an optional step. Not every sandcastle needs a moat, but they often look much more relaxed and potent with some water around the edges. To create a canal, dig a trench around the base of your sandcastle. It can be around, square, or intricate pattern. The shape doesn't matter. Secondly, you will want to pour water around the edges of the trench to smooth out the walls and base. It will appear neater and completed. Finally, make sure there is no loose sand around the edges that could fall inside your trench.
If you want to fill your moat with water, you may want to add plastic bags to your list of sandcastle materials. If you choose to do so, you will dig your trench first, then line the bottoms and sides with trash bags. It prevents water from penetrating the sand below. After doing this, completely cover the bags with about an inch or two of sand. The sand will flatten and spread when you pour water onto it, so be sure to put enough sand so you don't see the bags underneath. After you have your sand, slowly pour water to fill up your moat.
Step 4: Decorating Your Sandcastle
Finally, the most accessible and amusing is no set path to follow. Have fun and make your castle however you want. Place all the decorations you have gathered on your sandcastle to give it something a little extra. Don't forget about texture if you don't think you will like that look. Forks and knives from the kitchen can make astonishing patterns along the edge of your castle. Finally, don't forget about strange things such as a paintbrush or even a piece of coral. These things can make astonishing patterns in multiple places along the walls of a castle.
Finally, sit back and enjoy the masterpiece you have created with the people you love, or simply as a relaxing exercise by yourself. If it's something you love, don't forget to take pictures before the sea washed it away.
by pankaj | Mar 12, 2022 | Travel Tips
Preparing for an overseas vacation takes planning. Divide your plan into tasks that need to be done months, weeks, and days before departure.
The success or failure of a much-anticipated vacation can lie in the details of the planning, that is. From deciding where to go through to finally getting on the airplane, many arrangements must be made. Make the process less arduous by dividing these arrangements into tasks to be tackled months, weeks, and days in advance of travel.
Planning for a Vacation Months in Advance
The decisions to be made as far in advance as possible are the ones that are going to cost you the most. These include airfares, hotel bookings, travel insurance, and travel visas.
Booking months in advance usually results in lower airfare. For example, in New Zealand, Earlybird deals for long haul travel generally come out three to four months in advance of peak travel periods. Once you’ve purchased your airfare, remember to submit any seating or meal requests to the airline.
Similarly, hotels prefer to have their rooms booked as far in advance. Therefore, you are likely to have more hotels and deals to choose from when booking months in advance.
While last-minute deals on airfares and accommodation are standard, their chances of being applicable and available on your specific dates are rare. Traveling with a family or just at certain times of the year, booking ahead is more likely to save you money than booking at the last minute.
As soon as you have paid for airfares and accommodation, you should also purchase your travel insurance. Travel insurance should be purchased simultaneously as your big-ticket items so that you will be covered immediately against cancellation penalties if any unforeseen circumstances arise that may delay or cancel your travel plans.
You should also investigate if travel visas are required and, at the same time, ensure that your passport is valid for travel to your particular destination. This is because travel visas and passports can take a long time to process, especially if the embassy or passport office is overseas.
Planning for a Vacation Weeks in Advance
Planning what to do when you are away and what to take should be done weeks in advance. It is so that any dentist and doctor’s appointments can be tidied away, especially if you need to renew prescriptions or get vaccinations. These are usually tasks that require a few weeks’ planning.
Booking house sitters or kennels and catteries for pets often need to be made weeks, if not months, ahead of travel. Booking car parks at the airport or booking a shuttle to take you to the airport should also be squared away weeks in advance.
Once you’ve decided where you are going on vacation, the fun part is planning what you will do when you are away. First, you can buy a brand new travel guide; although be warned, they can be costly. Alternatively, bid on used travel guides on online auction sites. If you start looking a few weeks in advance, you should be able to get a recent one at a reasonable price or take advantage of book sales. You can even download special travel guide applications to your Apple iPhone for a fraction of the cost of paper guides.
Creating a packing list a few weeks in advance will be helpful, so when you discover that you need a new bikini, you will have sufficient time to save for one or search for the ever-elusive perfect one.
A packing list will also help identify anything that needs to be purchased, such as power adaptors, a new book, earplugs, or noise-canceling headphones for the flight.
Planning for a Vacation Days in Advance
The only tasks that remain to be done in the days leading up to your vacation should not rely on supply. For example, don’t put off buying anything till the last minute. Likewise, the only things that should be done in the days leading up to your travel are charging any electronic devices you are taking, doing your laundry, and suspending paper deliveries.
Foreign currency can be purchased anytime, ideally when you think you will get the best exchange rate. I hate having money lying around the home, so I generally only buy currency in the days leading up to my travel. However, don’t leave it until the last day because it may not always be available at your chosen supplier or even at the airport if they have had a run on that particular currency.
Similarly, if you are relying on your credit card as the primary source of funds, ensure that you have transferred funds to it days in advance to allow time for all transfers to clear.
Packing takes time, so do it over days. This way, you’ll have time to reflect on the wisdom of your packing choices and alter them if need be. Also, ensure you are up to date with any laundry washing that needs to be done to have a whole wardrobe available to choose from.
If no one will be clearing your letterbox or housesitting for you, ensure that you suspend any paper deliveries to avoid making it completely obvious to opportunistic thieves that no one is home.
Have Fun!
Now it’s time to rest. Nothing is worse than stress on the way to the airport when you discover that you’ve forgotten to pack something or turn off the stove. Planning means less stress in the lead-up and more chance of enjoying your holiday because you’ll know that everything possible has been done.
by pankaj | Mar 12, 2022 | Vacations & Leisure
Combine a summer beach holiday with four famous festivals and a fifth newcomer celebrating culture, tradition, and fantastic performances.
When summer is a whole flower in August, but hints of September and autumn start to claim one’s attention, many are still thinking about summer vacation plans. Suppose this describes you, and you are anywhere near the Great Lakes. In that case, there are many possibilities for a quick getaway that combines beach and water activities by day with exceptional cultural experiences in the evening. Festivals of music and theatre abound.
If you have time for a ‘real’ vacation, i.e., ten days or more, your trip could include a number of the large, long-established, well-known festival celebrations of culture. Classic and contemporary drama, classical music, Celtic music, and ballet and modern dance festival in Chicago await you in August in the Great Lakes.
Visit Three Great Lakes and See World-Famous Drama in Ontario
Every year the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake, on Lake Ontario, produces ten to twelve plays by George Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries, presented in four theatres. That adds up to nearly 800 performances, an audience approaching 300,000. This year, you could be one of them and watch the festival’s esteemed acting ensemble present Candida, On the Rocks, Heartbreak House, or My Fair Lady, or see one of the seven non-Shaw productions. The festival is celebrating its 50th season this year.
Niagara on the Lake, the community that hosts the Shaw Festival, is a summer vacation destination, one of the oldest small cities in Canada; it is also considered one of the most charming, with elegant houses and gardens on its tree-lined streets. The Niagara River joins Lake Ontario here. Is Niagara Falls twenty minutes to the south. ?Directly across from Lake Ontario in Toronto, which is about thirty miles due north.
Ontario has that if there is one drama experience to rival or surpass the Shaw Festival. The Stratford Shakespeare Festival, a mere nine years older than the Shaw Festival, sets the bar for classical theatre in North America. From its first production in 1953, this festival created excitement with its efforts to produce Shakespeare’s plays on an open stage or “under stage conditions for which they had been written,” according to former Festival archivist James R. Aikens.
The town of Stratford is not on any lake but is nicely positioned between three large ones. Toronto has spread out along the north shore of Lake Ontario just a two-hour car ride to the east, while an hour drive to the west brings you to charming beach towns on Lake Huron. Suppose you head north from Stratford for approximately two hours. In that case, you will come to the rocky Bruce Peninsula that encloses Lake Huron’s beautiful Georgian Bay or enjoy a shorter drive south to the sandy beaches of Lake Erie.
The Peninsula Music Festival and Irish Fest on Lake Michigan
Over on Lake Michigan, you can combine your beach vacation with music. In Door County, WI, the Peninsula Music Festival is an orchestral tradition dating back to 1953, the same year that the Shakespeare Festival began. It continues every August with professional musicians from major symphonies and rising young guest soloists. This year’s soloists have included cellist Wendy Warner, pianist Stewart Goodyear, and eighteen-year-old violin prodigy Caroline Goulding.
For a complete change of pace, travel down Lake Michigan’s shore to Milwaukee where the city’s Summerfest grounds, adjacent to the lake, will ring non-stop for four days, with the insistent rhythms of the fiddles, tin whistles, uilleann pipes, and bodhrans of Irish music and step dances.
WEEK OF FREE DANCE IN CHICAGO
At the bottom of Lake Michigan and also the bottom of the August calendar, there is one last festival for your consideration. While the Chicago Dancing Festival may not have the decades-long track record of the other events described here, it is undeniably significant. In 2011, the event celebrated its fifth year; it has brought some of the biggest names in the ballet and modern dance world to Chicago for free concerts that have been presented to tens of thousands.
The company, San Francisco Ballet.
Lar Lubovitch, Mark Morris, Azure Barton, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater are just some of the fantastic dancers and companies that have performed at the Harris Theatre and the outdoor Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park the last week in August.
The 2019 Chicago Dancing Festival has expanded to five days of performances beginning Tuesday, August 23, at various indoor venues, culminating with the outdoor concert at the Pritzker Pavilion. Saturday, August 27, featuring the Paul Taylor Company, Ballet West, the Joffrey Ballet, New York City Ballet artists, etc.
by pankaj | Mar 12, 2022 | Vacations & Leisure
The centuries-old skill of gold panning is being revived in countries worldwide as a sport in which the whole family can compete.
Like the gold prospectors of old, participants in a gold panning competition have to swirl sand and gravel out of the gold panning pan, leaving a trail of the heavier gold. The difference is that ion is done in a race against competition time. The sport aims to find, in the best time, all the gold flakes seeded into a bucket of gravel and sand. Time penalties are added for lost fragments.
Gold Panning Competition
Competitors collect a bucket of 15 – 20 kilograms of sand and gravel, which the chief judge has seeded with anything between 5 – 12 tiny gold flakes. Everyone has the same number of gold flakes in a single event, but they don’t know how many. Every participant also gets a clear glass tube sealed with a cap and partly filled with clear water to place the gold flakes they find.
With buckets and tubes and their pans, competitors move to the panning pools filled with 20 – 30cm of water. These pools are artificial and not in natural rivers or lakes to not pollute the environment. The pan, bucket, and glass tube are placed on the side of the pool while the participant waits for the starting signal.
The Gold Rush
When the signal goes off, some of the bucket’s content is poured into the pan, and water is scooped up from the panning pool. Skill comes to play in the way the mixture is swirled to wash out the sand and gravel and (hopefully) leave the heavier gold flakes behind. This process is repeated until all the original sand and gravel in the bucket is washed away, while all the time is looking out for and collecting the flakes of gold.
When finished, the competitor raises their hand for the timekeeper. Then, the tube with gold flakes is placed inside the pan, and the participant moves to the judges to count the gold flakes.
Speed is essential. At Poland’s 2019 International Gold Panning Championships, the category winner for proficient men, Keranen Veikko of Finland, found his seven gold flakes in 1 minute and 14 seconds.
Gold Panning as a Family Sport
Gold panning competitions have events for beginners, proficient men and women, veterans, juniors, and children. That is, everyone in the family may participate. There are also 2-man, 3-man, and five-person team contests so that family members can compete together as a team.
For information on where and how to participate in gold panning, visit The World Gold Panning Association site, which links the 21 affiliated associations in countries worldwide.
Gold Panning Championships
The World Gold Panning Championships in 2019 will be held in Pilgrims Rest, South Africa, and in 2020 in Biella, Italy. June 2019 sees the Scottish and British Gold Panning Championships in Scotland and the European Championships in Finland.
by pankaj | Mar 12, 2022 | Travel Tips
The Pacific Edge Hotel in Laguna Beach, CA, recently held a fundraising event to benefit the Mauli Ola Foundation.
The Pacific Ocean was a serene and beautiful backdrop for a recent fundraising event held at The Pacific Edge Hotel in Laguna Beach, CA. As part of Laguna Beach a la Carte event, for only $45, attendees lounged at The Deck and were treated to expansive ocean views, a specialty cocktail competition, a taco cook-off, and a stand-up paddleboard race. The community came together to attend the event in hopes of raising money for the Mauli Ola Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to helping kids suffering from Cystic Fibrosis by exposing them to the benefits of saline treatment through surfing.
The Deck, an open-air bar and restaurant, is located steps away from the beach at the Pacific Edge Hotel, a Hotel of Joy. What was once a deck reserved for weddings and private events has been transformed into a popular eatery for those wanting an ocean view and tasty California cuisine. So whether you’re looking to grab a romantic cocktail at sunset or take the family out for a casual meal, The Deck offers something for everyone.
“Laguna Beach is the quintessential casual, laid-back California beach town with a touch of urban sophistication, incredible weather, and pristine beaches,” said Bill Tremper, general manager of Pacific Edge. “We wanted to create a culturally relevant space, where people can unwind while enjoying quality food and great service. In addition, we want to give locals and visitors alike an unforgettable Laguna Beach experience.”
Cocktails for a Cause
The following mixologists concocted their favorite libations for the cocktail competition guests voted on at this special event.
- Erik Trickett from 320 Main in Seal Beach: Angel’s Envy Bourbon, pomegranate juice, molasses, lemon juice, and dijon mustard.
- Danielle Tarango from Nirvana Grill: Chase Vodka, passion fruit juice, triple sec, simple syrup, lime, cilantro, cayenne pepper, sugar.
- Giovanni Labile from Ocean Avenue Brewery: St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur, strawberries, lemon juice, natural sugar, prosecco, and ginger.
- Gabrielle Dion from Broadway: Zaya Rum, black cardamom, pineapple juice, lime, bitters.
- Steve Garcia: Peligroso Silver 100% Blue Agave Tequila, green tea, simple jalapeno syrup, pineapple juice, grapefruit juice, shiso, and sake.
The winner of the cocktail competition was…Gabrielle Dion! The winning cocktail will be on the menu at The Deck for the summer.
Not Your Typical Taco
Guests were treated to free tacos from the following restaurants and chefs who vied for the best taco in town.
The winning taco award went to La Sirena Grill, committed to supporting sustainability.
Guests lined the beach to cheer on their favorite team during a stand-up paddleboard competition to round out the day. The following sections enjoyed the competitive spirit for a good cause:
And the trophy went to…SUP Company!
It was a fun and delicious day for the benefit of the Mauli Ola Foundation and all the excellent work they do in helping to change the lives of children with Cystic Fibrosis.
