Look at these big animal sandcastles! Leaving the beach at the end of the day is always an adventure. After everyone has trickled away at dusk, we stay on for some stargazing or to build a fire. As we make our way down the shoreline back to the road, the headlights of the car illuminate the strangest things in the dark. We drove straight past this absurdly large game of cat and mouse and almost missed it in the blackness, but then we looped around for a second look at mystery.
Look at the level of detail here! Someone collected small colored seashells to inlay them like mosaic and give the animals their features. Bits of seaweed and sticks make other details like the inside of the ears and the whiskers. It’s amazing what they did with a shovel, a bucket, some water, a little imagination, and some dedication to detail.
This mouse’s tail was the best. In the dark it looked so proportionally realistic to the shape of the mouse body, to the point where I was almost afraid to touch it even though I knew it was just made of sand.
The match: a staredown. I don’t know what breed of mouse that is, but it does not look intimidated by the pouncing purrer. Proportionally, either the cat is a kitten or the mouse is a rat. A giant field mouse.
Behind the cat there was this gator animal sandcastle, maybe to bring a little challenge for the cat into the fray. Do gators eat cats? I wouldn’t want to go anywhere near a set of feral claws myself, whether I had thick skin or not.
The texture on the back of this gator, though. Texas has the best sand for sandcastles, because it is so fine and easy to sculpt. Always bring a shovel when you go to the beach, or at least a camera 😉
