At the end of July I went on holiday to Portmadog, Wales, staying at a caravan park with some family and my son. It had been a long day of travel full of concern about my son who was uncharacteristically deciding not to eat anything and who was later travel sick, causing us to pull over on a mountain pass road in Snowdonia. By the time we got to the caravan park there was little to do except check out the amenities and get some food in for the week ahead. After that, my boy ginally decided to eat properly right before his bedtime. None of this made for a bad day but it was quite tiring and I felt as though I hadn’t been myself. So I left my mother to watch over sleeping baby while I took a short stroll. Around the back of the caravan park was a nature reserve with lots of branching walking paths. I already knew which one I was going to take, the one right there above, the one that went to the sand dunes. Sand dunes get looked over way too much when it comes to natural beauty. They can be tiresome to walk ebcause if, well, he sand fighting against your every step the moment you find an incline, but the way they seem to go on forever with no obvious end captures the imagination. I sat at the top of one of the dunes overlooking the beach. A few families remained, packing up for the day, and a few more families came to replace them even as the evening grew late. A paddle boat was coming to shore too. George Lucas once wrote, I don’t like sand. It’s rough, course and it gets to everywhere. It’s not only a really odd and infamously bizzare line of dialogue, but I also disagree with it. Sand is really cool. It stands in stark contrast to the rest of the Earth and reminds you some parts of it can slip between your fingers in an entirely physical, non-metaphorical way. It’s soft in that way, but it’s also hard as a rock. Try falling over in sand and telling me it was a good time. This was my view walking back to the caravan park. Wales is such a beautiful country and it’s greatest quality is how humbling it is. North Wales, around Snowdonia and by the the shore, the environment is doing everything it can to make you feel small. It’s a neat perception trick because Wales is hardly a big country, but everything about it is projected on such a level that you still feel like you have to embark on a quest to get from A to B accross it’s massive vertical landscape. I felt a lot better after my walk and sitting in the sand. But I did notice that my shoes were ill suited for the occasion. My shoes in particular seem to have two big holes in the top of them, which let in quite a bit of sand and made for a marginally uncomfortable walk home when I was too stubborn to risk getting sand on my socks by removing my shoes to empty them. Next time, I’ll do sandles.