Last week, I went with (above, from left to right) Bethan, Rhiannon and Carl to recce beaches across the North Wales coast. We left Cardiff at 6am and arrived at our first beach, Dinas Dinlle, near Caernarfon.

We then explored the coast of Anglesey and I had a pot noodle for lunch. Chicken and mushroom flavour!

When the sun went down, we drove back to the cottage where we stayed overnight - and the local pub in Pentir - to start reconciling some of our initial ideas and thoughts with a lager-shandy (well, we were working!)

The next day:

After a lovely breakfast of Bethan's perfectly boiled hen eggs, we set off as the sun started to rise to try and make the most of the short daylight hours. But as we drove the coast road, we realised that although it was light enough to see the beaches - there were none there! The tide had come in, right up to the coast road, and it would be a couple of hours before we could see any actual beach! So we drove to Prestatyn, a popular Beach town.

We visited the fantastic Scala Arts Centre, where we met with Chris, the Scala manager and Jonathan, who runs the local youth Pop-In Centre, who had just been granted £50K from the Lottery People's Millions, so congrats to them for their passion and hard work! We also had a great chat with Rhiannon Wyn Hughes from Denbighshire CC, who told us about all the events and happenings in Prestatyn.

We had a brilliant time and looking around Prestatyn Beach was really exciting, especially as the wind was blowing us sideways and it was freezing cold.

I loved seeing the Beach Towns out of season; Prestatyn, Rhyl and Llandudno all had a very different, magical, unreal feel to them. Although we were seeing the beaches out of season (we are doing The Beach show in July), it definitely made us appreciate what COULD happen with the project if the weather happened to be miserable!

So watch this space and join the Group NTW05: The Beach, to be kept up to date on how the project develops. The artists are off on their own paths for the next few weeks, developing ideas and seeing what happens when they try to imagine a piece of game-theatre in such an open space as a beach.

Hope you all enjoy seeing it develop!