Team TLD is big into websites, big into team building exercises, and big into having fun.. so when an opportunity arises to combine all three it’s really a bit of a no-brainer!
A couple of weeks ago the whole team trekked off to Wales for a weekend to participate in our second Our Say Our Way Steering Group Residential, a project which is going along swimmingly! For those of you not familiar with the Our Say Our Way project, this a website we have just recently launched that will give Young People in the UK, involved in the Our Say Our Way project, a voice within their communities.

Welsh Rabbit, er.. Rarebit

The weekend in Wales was an opportunity for us to present our website design ideas to the young people, as well as being able to join them in death defying activities that involved massive cliff faces, raging sea waters and, once again, wetsuits (I’m beginning to smell a theme here to these weekends..)

After skilfully managing to avoid the wetsuit scenario on the last Residential, we soon discovered that we weren’t going to be so lucky this time. And to add insult to injury we were required to wear shorts over the wetsuits to ‘protect the wetsuits on the rocks’ (translation: hide our modesty so that any embarrassment was avoided!). The result of this was what looked like a huddle of clothes wearing, helmet adorned penguins slowly making our way towards what seemed like certain death… (Cue funeral march).

Seafaring adventures

Okay, so maybe I’ve over exaggerated this scenario slightly! Certain death it certainly wasn’t. More like an adrenalin fuelled coasteering adventure that involved us throwing ourselves off ragged Welsh cliff faces and rocks into the sea below. Suddenly wetsuits didn’t seem like such a bad idea! In fact I’ve never been gladder about looking like a penguin than I did at that moment. Loss of limbs to frostbite might have been a certainty without out one, and I don’t want to even begin to think about the state our backsides would have been in after all the slithering around on jagged rock faces we did!

The next day we dragged on soggy wetsuits again, this time to go sea kayaking. Now, if you ever wanted to build up those saggy baggy arms muscles then boy! Is this the activity for you! After a couple of hours of open sea paddling and general hooligan antics (I still owe Michael for his foul misdemeanours aimed at my poor self..) we dragged ourselves out to get changed, utterly exhausted, but rather chuffed with ourselves.. and I say dragged because at that point our arms were so buggered that it was an effort to lift a pencil, let alone find the energy to pick up a towel and pull a wetsuit off.

There’s method in the madness

In between all these activities we somehow found the time to spend a few hours presenting design ideas to the Young People (the true aim of our weekend there) that were to be transformed into the new Our Say Our Way website! Votes were taken, decisions made and as a result a brand spanking new website now stands proud, showcasing exactly what Our Say Our Way does and just how beneficial a project such as this one can be.

Once again an absolute blast was had by all, and we headed home exhausted but triumphant in our return, having conquered all objectives set out for the weekend! Now that the website has been launched our next step is training the kids (and adults!) on how to use the website and keep it regularly updated.. our goal for the next Residential, taking place in the next few weeks. Watch this space for our next adventure!