Become a volunteerWhen I first signed up to do my Queens Guide Award, one of the elements I was most excited to complete was the exploration/ expedition. It sounded like a holiday with friends and I thought it’d be a really easy element to complete. Whilst completing the award I learnt that a lot of people do this section with a group of Girlguiding members, not just their friends, and this seemed to me to be a fun spin on the task, it’d make it a more unique trip. For this section you need to have an active part in organising a trip lasting 3 nights, I’d already decided I wanted to do an exploration of a town or city instead of an expedition as this meant I could do it at any time of year instead of just the summer when the weather was better. However, that’s as far as I had got, I seemed to be putting off actually organising the trip whilst I worked on other elements.
One day I got a notification from a Facebook group I’m a part of for people doing the award; Georgina, a girl in a similar situation to me, was looking for a group of people to go on an exploration to Cardiff within October. This sounded like a great opportunity, and the dates she was wanting to go I could do. I messaged her about this mentioning wanting to use it as part of my award too and together with others who had also responded we came up with a plan. Georgina would sort out accommodation and food, I would plan our exploration, including all activities and our schedule whilst other members joining us would be using it as a different part of their award. Then three weeks before our trip two girls dropped out, leaving us not fulfilling all the requirements for this section. We asked everywhere we could find a replacement and finally one week before the trip we found someone local to Cardiff who was up for our adventure and saved the day!
To keep the cost of our trip low we’d decided to stay outside of Cardiff closer to Barry Island in a caravan, this allowed us to prepare our own meals and explore a bit more of South Wales. We also had a discussion about what the purpose of our exploration would be, we decided we wanted to see as much of the area as possible so decided to do an A-Z of Cardiff and Barry Island, this allowed us to see everything we wanted to see as well as get to see some areas we wouldn’t go to otherwise as they weren’t necessarily tourist traps. Whilst this might have been a bit harder to plan, and required a lot of googling of the area, I’m so happy we went with this idea as we definitely wouldn’t have gone to all of these places we did if we’d have chosen to explore something else in the area, it also kept us busy for the full four days.
Don’t get me wrong coming up with a place for every letter of the alphabet proved quite difficult and we had to stretch the rules for some letters, especially X which we used ‘Experiment’ for and visited a liquid nitrogen ice cream bar to mark as complete. Some of my favourite places we went to include the locations used in Gavin and Stacey on Barry Island, Llandaff Cathedral, the Wales Millennium Centre & Water Tower and Cardiff Bay, all of which I’d highly recommend visiting if you’re in the area. We also ensured that we fitted in some more fun activities into our trips such as an escape room and mini golf which definitely brought out our competitive sides. I was shocked when we ended up visiting a few more places than we’d initially expected too as there was so much to see as we walked around Cardiff, I didn’t think we’d have time to fit these in but we did. There was so much more than I had initially expected there to be in the area and I’d definitely think of doing an A-Z of a city or town again if I didn’t know where to go.
Overall, I think that doing this trip with people in guiding from around the country was such a great opportunity and I’m so glad I decided to go down this route of completing this part of the award. It made this trip truly unique and memorable, if a little bit stressful when people dropped out. I had such a fun weekend and would recommend an A-Z of a city to anyone looking for a fun way to fulfil the requirements.
