If you are going to be going to the beach for a vacations sometime this summer or spring, I would highly recommend booking your beach vacation around a sandcastle competition in the area you plan on staying.
  There are even huge festivals in Western Europe with each artist trying to outdo the other one and win the top prize.
  Attending a sandcastle competition is well worth it.
  It is great family time.
  After attending the event, you or your family may  be inspired to go create something for yourself.
   Well at least my family want to go build something.
  Watching some of the artists at these events is mesmerizing, the patience they have in creating their works of art is amazing.
  They use tools that look like they came out of my kitchen drawer or my tool box in the garage.
  A small paint brush for brushing tiny grains of sand off of a sculpture, a pastry knife for other fine detailed work,  a water spray bottle to moisten the sand, those are only a few of the items I saw in the sculptures toolbox.
   I of course am happy with a plastic bucket and shovel.
  Well, maybe more than one bucket and they have to be in several different sizes and shapes.
  Of course the scale of some of these creations is really amazing.
  Much more so than my puny little attempt at sandcastle sculpting.
  Usually prior to the actual competition, part of the team associated with these festivals, start preparing the sites for the artist.
  Most of these site preps start with the foundation area.
  This is called "pound up".
    Normally wooded boxes are made according to certain dimensions and sand filled into the bottom "box".
  The sand has to be compacted down in some sort of fashion pounding it down with some sort of tool or jumping on it and water is usually involved to help compact the sand into a workable art medium.
   I don't think the artist would be very happy if the foundation work wasn't satisfactory and what could be a winning sculpture, tumble down because of lack of prep work.