Lance Lambert made the mistake a lot of young drivers make when first taking a car for a spin on the beaches of Ocean Shores — he got stuck with the tide coming in.

The longtime television host of the “Vintage Vehicle Show,” car expert, author and nine-year master of ceremonies for the annual Show N’ Shine at the Shores event this weekend has been visiting the area since a teenager growing up in Tacoma.

“I got a ‘54 Olds stuck in the sand there,” Lambert confessed. It was in 1965, and it took “a small army” to lift it out.

“I was trying to find a party that all my buddies were at, and it was foggy. I didn’t realize that the stuff I was driving through was the soft sand of the dunes,” he said.

Luckily, then 17-year-old Lambert found the party and enough young men to lift the car out of its burrowing hole.

Lambert does two shows a year now at the Quinault Beach Resort and Casino and leaves the heavy lifting to others.

Over the years, he has many fond memories of Ocean Shores. He and his brother once rode a Lambretta motor scooter around the Olympic Peninsula to Ocean Shores, ending up broke and hungry. They feasted on sugar water and fresh clams harvested for a couple of women who had clam guns but didn’t want to get dirty.

“We split the clams with them and then camped about where the roundabout in Ocean Shores is now,” he recalled. The scooter, however, began to misfire because they had not broken in the motor properly, and the Lambert brothers had to limp about 25 mph along the shoulder of the road all the way to Tacoma.

Lambert this weekend will be awarding trophies and appearing at QBRC during the Show N’ Shine, which runs from Friday through Saturday. The event is sponsored by www.pushrods.org. Register for $20 ($15 online) for a chance at $2,500 in cash and prizes, with a poker run on Friday.

As far as local car enthusiasts, Lambert singles out Ocean Shores’ Ed Duncan for having a “pretty impressive” collection. Duncan, in fact, is featured in one of Lambert’s shows.

“There are a lot of homes out there with a car or two tucked away in the garage,” he said of the North Beach car community. “They all come out to shows at the casino.”

Whether it’s truly show and shine weather or not, Lambert will have a booth to display his books and videos of his shows. Personally, he’s always on the lookout for the local ‘40 Ford owned by Don Richards, which he calls a “very famous car. That’s a very significant car in the history of hot-rodding and custom cars.”

“My personal favorites are all the Studebakers and Packards, anything they don’t make any more,” Lambert said.