Blog post by Sarah K
Third briefing began on a VERY wet Friday at the end
of July. We all travelled up (or across) to PGL Caythorpe, which for most of us
took much longer than planned due to rain, traffic etc – generally your typical
English summer day! Sarah S was being
dropped off in Grantham a little later in the evening than the rest of us, so
we went on a road trip in Katie’s car to pick her up! Katie doesn’t have the biggest car and had
never driven it with so many people in it, so squashing us all in was quite
amusing – I’m not sure she’ll volunteer to drive next time! We turned up in ASDA car park in typical Team
Latvia style…with a picture of a pigeon attached to a pole to help Sarah find
us (for those of you not in on the joke, Anna (GOLD co-ordinator) suggested to
the leaders that they could communicate via carrier pigeon….we took this very
literally and managed to send her one at the World Scout Jamboree!!).
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| Anna with the 'pigeon' we sent her at the World Scout Jamboree in Japan! |
Once back at PGL, we set about our first very
important task for the weekend – celebrating Net’s birthday! We got her a
variety of silly presents, including a bubble gun/fan (very handy for Latvia!)
and of course ate some cake (made by Sarah K).
This was a bit of a late night with everyone so full of sugar so we sat
up chatting and catching up ready to get to work in the morning.
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| Presents, cakes & pigeons |
Saturday started on a slightly sad note. Unfortunately Ellen has decided that she is
unable to continue with the project and come to Latvia, due to personal
commitments. We are going to miss her
very much, but wish her all the best!! That
leaves us as a team of five moving forwards, and so we set about discussing the
rest of the project and how to work as a five.
Net had created a list of 18 things we needed to
discuss over the weekend – not much really!! We began by doing the easy
bit….writing the kit list. An hour later
we had filled a massive white board with all sorts of things we need to
remember. We were excited to receive an
email from the Chief Guide in Latvia telling us more about the project, and
began to discuss what we need to plan. A
lot of our work is going to be with the Rangers and Rovers so we looked at what
resources were available in the UK already and made a list of things we need to
collect. We are also going to be doing a
whole international based training day….more info on this will come from 4th
briefing! We also discussed ways of
reviewing things on project, including having a worry box and a memory box, and
debated what gifts to get our hosts.
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| Creating the kit list |
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| Laura's excited!! |
After lunch we decided it was time for some team
building so Net took us up on the high ropes course. Sarah, Sarah and Katie took a bit of
convincing to do it, but Laura thought it was great. Needless to say we all made it round – Laura
and Sarah K even had another go! After
we had all recovered from the adrenaline rush we got back to doing more
planning and had almost finished our to do list by the end of the day. After dinner we headed down the road to the
local pub for a drink, where we sat at a table next to a parrot not in a cage (much
to Sarah K’s horror!), and Laura tried to teach us a new version of I-spy. This took us a loooooonnnngggg time to figure
out, and I for one am still slightly confused, hopefully I’ll understand by the
end of project! We spent most of the
evening relaxing, eating more cake and getting very competitive over Uno and Dobble.
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| We survived!! |
Sunday was Katie’s birthday! We had more presents,
more cake, and more planning time! We
discussed how we all deal with different emotions (a hug seems appropriate in
most situations!) as well as discussed when our next teleconference will
be. We finished off the morning by
taking a few pictures before having lunch and played a few more games of Dobble
and ninjas before loading into cars and going our separate ways ready for 4th
briefing in just less than 6 weeks time!
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| Katie's birthday cake |
GOLD love
Sarah K and Team Latvia xx
