Hey everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the
Understandable English Podcast. My name is Oliver and today we
are going to be talking about camping.
So what is camping? And I am going to be talking
about a recent camping trip that I took with my friends.
OK, the official definition of camping is a holiday that is
spent in a tent, but it can be one or two nights.
It can be a small trip and maybe include hiking, but in general
it is staying somewhere in a tent, often in nature or in the
wild, or even at a campsite. So a place designed for camping.
And in case you don't know the word in English, a tent is
something that you build and it has fabric or cloth and you
sleep inside of it. When I was a teenager I did
quite a bit of camping, so I went camping I quite a few times
with both friends and family and I loved it.
I did really enjoy it. There is a lot of satisfaction
and enjoyment from building the tent, making a place to stay,
cooking some food, and enjoying nature and time with friends or
family. So today I'm going to talk a bit
about a recent camping trip. I've actually made an easy
English vlog about this trip on my YouTube channel.
I will leave the link below. So after you listen to this
podcast you can watch the video and see exactly what I was
talking about and see the place I was and what we did.
A few weeks ago it was one of our friends birthdays and they
decided that they wanted to go camping for their birthday.
So we all got our stuff ready, our tents and supplies.
To be honest it had been a long time since we went camping or
since I have been camping and my wife kid had never really been
camping properly before, only one time which was on a kind of
organized trip. So we had to try and find all of
the stuff that we needed. Some of the items that we needed
included a tent, a cooker, so a gas cooker, something to make
the food on. We had to gather all of the food
and supplies that we needed as well, and I brought a cooling
box. This is a box or a container.
We call it a cooler to keep the food cold and to stop it from
going bad For sleeping we brought sleeping bags.
These are like almost like blanket bags that you get into
at night to sleep. I'm sure you have used these
before but in English we call them sleeping bags.
They keep you nice and warm and of course we brought a lot of
blankets to and pillows. So for this trip we weren't
exactly going into the wild. We were going to a campsite, a
place for camping and it was on the North Coast, so in the very
north of Ireland of Northern Ireland.
It is quite windy there at times and it is close to the seaside.
The benefit of this is that we were bringing the car, so there
was plenty of space to bring items.
We didn't have to carry them in big backpacks because of this.
We also brought some air beds or air mattresses which I could
inflate so to put air into them from the car and it made
sleeping a little bit more comfortable.
OK, so we've gathered all of our items for camping.
We've got light food, tent, sleeping stuff like sleeping
bags, air beds and everything that we need and we set off.
So we left in the car. The weather at home seemed
really nice but as we drove towards the campsite it began to
look more cloudy and like it was going to rain.
And it did start to rain a few times and I thought great, this
is going to be a wet weekend and quite a difficult weekend to
enjoy the outdoors. When we arrived to the campsite
we were the first people there from our friends and we decided
to start setting up our tent because it is quite a big tent
and I haven't set it up in years, so I had to try to
remember how to do it. It took us probably about 90
minutes to set up. It was quite a task and during
the time it began to rain very heavily and we had to stop
building our tent and take a break and hide in the car.
But eventually we got the tent up and some random strangers,
people that we don't know, also helped us to set it up.
They were very kind and then once our friends arrived I was
able to help them set up the tents or their tents as well.
The weather cleared up and became a bit nicer which allowed
us to enjoy being outdoors more. We began to set up for cooking
and for dinner we decided to have steaks, so BBQ steaks.
So we prepared the barbecue and started the fire and got the
steaks ready. They took quite a while to cook
but they were so tasty and very worth it.
We had mushrooms as well which we barbecued on the fire and
halloumi cheese which is very nice and then afterwards we had
burgers as well. I I had so much food and I felt
quite sleepy afterwards because I had eaten so much stuff.
But we were able to enjoy sitting outdoors eating our food
and having great times together listening to music and talking.
It was a really nice evening. It got a lot colder at night
once it was dark and quite windy as well.
But the nice part about the darkness was we could really see
the stars, they were so clear at night time.
So I enjoyed looking up at the sky and seeing the stars very
clear. But it was time for bed.
We went and got some sleep, but I didn't sleep very well because
it was quite noisy during the night.
Tents are not very good at keeping noise out, so of course
I could hear everything. So people talking and dogs
barking, babies crying, all the noise from around the campsite
and in the morning some terrible weather started.
It was so windy and rainy. It felt like a storm or a
hurricane. It was intense.
The weather was so bad that we actually couldn't cook breakfast
outside. So we got in the cars and we
drove to the restaurant and we had our breakfast indoors, which
was tasty, and after that we tried to take down our tents and
pack everything up. It was so wet and I got soaked
with water. My clothes were wet, my hair was
wet and afterwards I just couldn't wait to get home to
have a shower and a warm drink and just relax.
But overall, it was still a really great trip and we had
such a good time. But let me know if you like
camping and have you went on many camping trips?
So leave a comment below and let me know.
And make sure to check out the YouTube video of camping so the
easy English vlog that I will leave in the description below.
Thank you for listening and have a great day.
Goodbye.