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.
Okay, 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 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 friend's 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, Kate, 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 too, 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.
Okay, so we've gathered all of our items for camping.
We've got lights 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 barbecue 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.
Then afterwards we had burgers as well.
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.
