Beach Picnic and How to Build a Sandcastle

San Diego is blessed with its abundant beaches and having a beach picnic is a must. It’s free and fun for all ages especially if you have friends with you.

Del Mar Beach

Del Mar Beach in Summer

My kids love Del Mar beach just because it has an active railroad crossing. Every so often a train will cross and they will run fast to see what train it is.  The beach has a playground, many grass areas with picnic tables & BBQ grills, lifeguards, shower, and restrooms. All of these providing great places for beach picnic. If it has fire pits, then it’s perfect to me.

Del Mar Beach Parking

Parking at Del Mar is quite a challenge. If you’re lucky you can find parking on the street around commercial or residential neighborhood. It’s free. But we like to park in the metered parking lot for public behind (below) L’Auberge Del Mar hotel. Usually we can find a spot there.

It’s $2 per hour so you’ll need lots a quarters if you plan to stay there for many hours. Good thing they have a change machine on site.  After 8 pm, it’s free.

Beach Picnic

We visited Del Mar Beach last week and stayed from afternoon till evening.  To keep the picnic simple, I just packed:

• changing clothes
• swimsuits
• towels
• bucket and sand toys
• store-bought pizza, chips and fruit
• water
• used plastic table cloth (reused one from party, easy to toss afterwards)
• a chair
• and baby talc (more of this latter).

The weather was warm and great. No wonder the beach was packed but we still could find a spot for our beach picnic. Our friends came along with a picnic umbrella and some sandcastle tools.

Activities

Beside chatting and playing with the water, we surfed, collected sand crabs and built a sandcastle.

Mama…..it’s cold!

The kids got a bucket of sand crabs

How To Build A Sandcastle

My friend taught us how to build a simple castle. I just knew that you needed more than just a bucket and a shovel to make it look good…:-)..

These are what you need to  build a  sandcastle:

• bucket
• shovel
• paint brush
• scrapers or something flat like blunt knife
• sculpting  tools
• lots of patience 🙂

Step 1: Dig a hole with the shovel and make a heap of sand. This pile will be the foundation for the new sandcastle.

Step 2: Shovel some sand into a bucket full of water. Take the wet sand out with your hands and make two sand towers.

Build towers for the sandcastle first

Step 3: Shape the towers with the scraper

Shaping the sandcastle tower

Step 4: Brush lightly the surface to make it smoother.

Step 5: Sculpt the towers. Take your time to carve the sandcastle.

Sculpting Sandcastle

Step 6: Add more structures (such as wall or smaller towers) if you want. Repeat step 3 – 5.

Adding a Sandcastle Tower

The builder left to surf, leaving us with the tedious task..:-)

The tiny blocks on top of the walls were cut and arranged alongside the wall.

Step 7.  The final Sandcastle.

The fantasy sandcastle

One tip for beach picnic I learnt somewhere is to clean your sandy feet with baby powder. Just rub the feet with the powder until they are smooth and clean from the sand. It worked last time to limit the sand getting into our car.

So have tips or trick you have for beach picnic? Feel free to comment.