It's one small move for youth work and it's one giant drive for the youth worker

How I imagined our journey starting.

At 03:00 on the 4th of August 2012 two YWEV (Youth work expeditionary vehicles (yes these are funny names for my car and the wife's car)) arrived atop on Trinity View on the southwestern corner of Wales. It ended a massive 10+ hour drive that was fraught with difficulties, a delayed departure coupled with YWEV 2's navigational problems - after one and a half miles, the next 370 miles were going to be interesting. To put that into context the last time we travelled down it took a little over 7 hours but arrived safe and sound, if a little tired and coffee dependant, although some say I'm that anyway.

Ok it was more like this, once you get rid of the rockets.

Since it is getting late I'm tempted to dwell upon the title of this post and come up with all sorts of silly and contrived lunar landing parallels which would be stretching things a bit but I'm going to anyway.



So it was more like this. The real YWEV 2 (above) aka a Vauxhall Corsa
and YWEV 1 also a Vauxhall Corsa.

 

1) A different view. We quite literally have a different view of things here. Back in Glasgow we woke up to see a well positioned brick wall, now we look down on England when we wake up. Any fellow Scots read what you will into that statement. For any offended English folks we literally look down on the Bristol Channel and the top of one of the English counties.



The view from our bedroom overlooking Caerleon.

2) Life is different. Even if Welsh village life isn't as drastically different from Scottish city living compared to spending time on the moon, there are some quite noticeable differences. The area we're living in is considerably more affluent than where we were living in Glasgow for a start. There is also a slower pace of life for us non-commuters with crazy rushing around. It's quite pleasant here if you ignore the the fact they enjoy building houses up ridiculously large and steep hills, when that's coming from a Glaswegian you know it's bad.

3) There's more life in Glasgow than on the moon and there is more life in Glasgow than down here.  Glasgow has a bigger population than Cardiff, Newport (including Caerleon), and Cwmbran put together. Besides that village life is closer than living in a big city, which is good as a lot of my role involves building relationships.

4) We're here for a purpose. Despite the fact that everyone remembers the iconic shots of astronauts playing golf on the moon there was a scientific and political purpose in putting then on the moon. Lizzie and I also have a work to do here. Lizzie's started work as a nurse in Cardiff and I've started to be involved with the youth work program. It's quite quiet at the moment as the schools are still off but it gives me a good chance to settle in and do planning and form filling.

5) We intend on coming home! I know we've only been here two weeks but we will come back to visit friends and family.