The English like a Native podcast is a free listening resource for intermediate and advanced English learners. Bonus episodes and transcripts are available to Plus members. Details will be in the show notes below and English courses can be found on my website, www.englishlikeanative.co.uk. Today's episode introduces vocabulary while touching on a bit of British culture related to camping. Hello there, you are listening to the English Like a Native Podcast, the podcast that's designed for lovers and learners of English. I'm your host, Anna, and today, we are setting up camp. Ah, camping, reconnecting with nature, sleeping under the stars, and generally escaping the distractions of everyday life. I camped a lot as a child. We weren't very well off, so camping was our go-to holiday. Your go-to means your default, the thing that you usually end up choosing. For example, my go-to morning beverage is a cup of coffee with coconut milk. This is the drink I will usually have, my go-to drink. Now I grew up in Manchester, which is in the northwest of England, not too far from Wales. Therefore, camping in Wales was an easy and affordable holiday choice for my mum. Our go-to holiday, and what an adventure. At least it's an adventure when you are a child. As an adult, there's a lot more work involved with camping. I didn't realise as a child, but gosh, camping can be really hard work. I mean, first you have to pick the right spot to pitch your tent. That's not an easy thing to do. Now, you don't want to camp in a ditch which may get boggy when it rains. Which in the UK is highly likely. Yeah, sleeping in a puddle is not fun, so avoid the ditches at all costs. To avoid something at all costs means something must be avoided. No matter what happens. It must be avoided. So avoid pitching your tents in a ditch at all costs. On the other hand, you don't want to pitch your tent up high in an exposed spot in case of windy weather, especially if you are camping on the coast. Which reminds me, if you put your tent up close to water, then you risk getting eaten alive by mosquitoes and midges. An ideal pitch would be a nice flat piece of ground, nice flat area, which is partially shaded by trees, but with a nice view of rolling hills or meadows or something. So the second thing you need to do once you've picked your pitch is to erect your tent. Erect means to build or raise something to a vertical position. In this case, a tent. Erect is a slightly more formal word. Often we just use the phrasal verb put up, so I find my pitch and I put up my tent, which is often easier said than done. Now, there are many different types of tents on the market these days. The easiest tent to put up is a pop-up tent. A pop-up tent, as I think you can guess from the name is a tent that literally just pops up. The frame is very bendy and flexible, and it's held in a folded position while packed away, waiting to be released. Pow. So when you release it, it pops up into a shape that it's meant to be. It erects itself, which is fantastic. Saves you a lot of time. The problem I always have with pop-up tents is that I'm unable to put them away again. I can't fold them back down. I'm always wrestling with the poles, trying to bend them in all sorts of different ways. I just can't fold them so that they all pack away. Back into the storage bag. You have to have the knack. My partner has a knack for these things. He's got a knack for folding away these pop-up tents. In fact, I have a few pop-up discs that I use for filming. So I have a pop-up green screen that starts as a small disc that I can hold in my hands, and then when you unzip the outer cover, it pops up into this huge green screen that's about six feet high. It's wonderful, but I can't put it away. You have to kind of bend the frame to make three circles, and I can never do that. I can only make two. I just don't have the knack. I'll fight with it for ages, but I can't seem to get my head around it. My partner, however, just comes in, squeezes it, twists it, and suddenly it's three small circles all folded into one disc and he pops it back into its packet and I say, how on earth did you do that? To which he replies, well, I just have the knack. I don't know. So the pop-up tent, nice and easy, as long as you can put them away again afterwards. They are quite small, often and lightweight. The downside is they could blow away quite easily if it's windy. So moving on to a tent that is a bit more substantial. We have a dome tent. A dome tent is similar to a pop-up tent. It is usually quite easy to set up, but with this one, you need to assemble and feed the poles into the tent. The poles are broken down into smaller parts, and most modern tent poles have a bungee or some sort of elastic through the middle of the poles to hold them together so you don't lose bits or put the wrong poles together. All you have to do is pop them together to make one big long pole, and then you feed the pole through the loops of the tent. And then once the poles are fed into the tent, then you can stand the poles up where they're supposed to be and erect the tent. Voila. We often actually talk about tents in terms of how many people you can sleep in it. So we'd say a two man tent, a four man tent, a six man tent. They do tend to go up in twos, I think, because even numbers are easier to work with. So if you have a pop-up tent, you might say, I have a two man tent. So if you are a keen camper, a camping enthusiast, another kind of tent that you might have is a bivy sack. A bivy sack. It looks almost like a sleeping bag. It's a long thin tent. I imagine it would be quite claustrophobic to sleep in a bivy sack if you suffer from claustrophobia, but they're very small, lightweight, and you can just put it in your backpack and do your day's hiking and then pull this thing out. Very easy to set up and climb into. You would quite literally hit the sack. To hit the sack is a phrase, which means you are going to bed to go to sleep. Oh, I'm pretty tired. I think I'm gonna hit the sack. So the bivy sack provides you with a little space to protect you from the elements. Most useful when you are halfway up a mountain. But if you are doing some serious family camping on a family campsite, then you'd have just an ordinary dome tent. Probably a cabin tent. So when we were little going to Wales, we would often take a tent that had compartments within it. So it must have been a cabin tent technically, but we would call it a six man or an eight man tent. So my mum would also take additional little like pop-up tents or maybe a pup tent, which is something that you see people using on the beach. A pup tent is just a tiny little open fronted tent. You often can't close them off. I believe they pop up and they're called a pup tent. I'm guessing because you would use it for your pup, your little doggy, your puppy. But you can use a pup tent for little children to have somewhere to shelter from the sun on the beach. And on a campsite, you can have a pup tent or a pop-up tent to store things or to put an extra child if you've got some additional children with you. So my mum would always lay a ground sheet first before putting up our tent, which is helpful in case there's some groundwater or if it's rained and the ground's a bit wet. So you have your ground sheet laid down First, you must make sure there are no rocks on the floor. You don't want anything protruding out of the ground because a protruding rock can put a hole into the bottom of your tent or can be very uncomfortable if you are lying on it, or if you step on it with bare feet. Then you lay your ground sheet and you put up your tent. Now, my mum would always hang these domes inside our eight man tent. I think, if I remember correctly, there were four domes that she hung up inside to make these separate little rooms. It was a big tent so you could stand up inside it. We would have some room for a couple of camping chairs, little folding chairs, and perhaps a little table. And then we would each pick a compartment to be our sleeping space. So we'd pick our rooms, as it were, and lay down our mats, and then our air beds. I would use something like a yoga mat. This adds just an extra little bit of cushioning against the hard ground. And then on top of that, the airbed, which needs a pump to inflate. I do have some hiking mattresses that self inflate, but they're not very thick. They don't provide much cushioning, but an air bed and a foot pump was how we used to do it. And you stand there for ages pumping the air into this airbed And you would need to repeat this every morning because overnight your airbed would slightly deflate. So you'd wake up in the morning almost being swallowed by your airbed. And then you'd lay out your pillow and your sleeping bag or blankets, or whatever it is you've taken with you to keep you warm overnight. Now, if this doesn't sound fun, if you are not into sleeping on the ground on an airbed or doing all this setup, then glamping is the new craze. If you don't want to deal with putting up your tent and all this stuff, then you can choose to go glamping. Glamping, the word glamping is the combination of the words glamorous and camping, glamping. So when you go glamping, you are often in a tipi tent or a yurt. These are much larger than your typical tent. They usually have wooden poles and are very spacious. They are shaped like a cone. The problem with yurts and tipis I find is that they lose the heat because the heat rises and they have quite a high ceiling, so it can feel a lot colder in the evenings as the temperature drops. And so I often feel that they aren't as nice to sleep in as sleeping in a smaller tent that holds the heat a bit better. But you do have room and often there is a camp bed. A camp bed is a bed that's raised, so there are legs on this bed. If you are doing normal camping, putting up your tents, you'd often not take a camp bed because it takes up a lot of space in the boot of your car or in your roof box. And so that's why people just choose to sleep on the floor on an air bed because air beds can pack down quite small. But when you are glamping, you tend to have a camp bed. It's all set up for you, so you're off the floor. Sometimes you even have a nice mattress and it's much more comfortable. And if you are doing really high-end luxurious glamping, then you know there are lots of luxuries included. You might have a side table, you probably have electricity and everything is all set up for you. You might even have a rug on the floor. A nice rug, nice and soft underfoot when you get up in the morning. I've never been glamping. I sound like I know what I'm talking about. I've never been glamping, but perhaps it's time that I gave it a go as research, of course, for the podcast. And then I could come and tell you all about my glamping experience. Okay, so once your tent is up and you've set up your beds and everything, one thing to make sure that you do is fix the lines. What's the proper name for these guidelines? Now, I've just looked this up. I've always thought they were called guidelines. Guidelines are a set of instructions to guide you to do something. But these camping lines are not guidelines. This is something I've been saying all my life. They are in fact called guy lines, like a guy. Another word for a man, a guy line. I mean, it's completely obvious why I would confuse the two words, guideline and guy line. Wow. See, you can learn something new every day if you are open to it. A guy line is like a rope or a cord or a very fixed string that's used to secure your tent or your tarp to the ground. We use metal or sometimes plastic tent pegs to stake our tents to the ground. Tent pegs are normally like thick metal pegs with a hook on one end, and you would stab it into the ground and then the hook would hold the guy line taut. To keep your erected tent in place. So yes, the problem with guy lines, I can't believe I thought they were guidelines. The problem with guy lines is everyone trips over them. Everyone trips over them. We all know they're there, but in the middle of the night when you are doing your nighttime walk to the toilet block, you inevitably trip over a guy line or two, sometimes pulling out the peg and collapsing someone's tent, which is not ideal. That's one of my fondest memories of camping, tripping over guy lines in the middle of the night when you need a wee. Now, one thing I do really love about camping is the sound of zips, zzz. It's like there's a smell and a sound for every experience, right? Every house has its own sounds and smells that just make you think of that house they're associated with that house. And, you know, a theme park will have its own sounds and smells. A theme park will have the sound of people screaming and the sound of roller coasters moving along its tracks. And the music that you only ever hear at theme parks and the smell of popcorn and hotdogs and things like that. Those are associated with theme parks. But for me, when I think of camping, I think of the smell of grass. And the smell of fresh air and then the sound of zips, particularly at nighttime when everyone's hunkering down for the night, they zip up their tents, and then in the middle of the night, people who need to run to the loo, they do their quiet unzipping. That sound always makes me think of camping, the sound of zips. Anyone else? Or is it just me? Now, if you are camping in a field like a farmer's field, then there aren't really many specific facilities for camping. You may only have a portaloo, oh, I'm not a fan of portaloos. A portaloo is a common brand. It's actually a brand name for a portable loo. When I say loo, I mean toilet. Portaloos are just big plastic boxes that contain a toilet. Obviously, if there's no other option, then the portaloo will do just fine. Beggars can't be choosers after all, and no one wants to be caught short when away from home. But the reason I don't like portaloos is I often find that they're a bit dirty, and when I get inside one, I'm overwhelmed by chemicals that make my eyes water and my nostrils burn. You quickly do your business trying desperately not to touch anything. There's often not enough toilet paper, and then you have to grab the lever and do the pumping action to pump the chemicals in and open up the hatch, or trap door, I'm not sure what the technical term is, for everything to fall down into the bucket below. Ooh, it's quite unpleasant, especially on a hot day when things have been baking in the sun. Not my idea of a good time. I would rather have a proper plumbed in toilet when I'm camping. I do like to have nice facilities. I'm a bit of a snob in that respect. I like a hot shower and a decent toilet, then I'm happy. Okay, so once everything's set up, it's time to set up your stove and get out your pots and pans so that you can prepare your meals and make that all important cup of tea. So you make a cup of tea by boiling your water on the camping stove, no kettles. Or you might have one of those metal kettles that can go on the stove that whistles. Oh. That's another sound you might associate with camping, the whistling kettle on the stove. And then after you've dirtied your dishes, you either go to the washing up area, the washing up point, with all your dirty pots and pans to wash everything up, so you can use it again. Or you go to the washing up point and get a bowl of hot soapy water to bring back to the camp to do the washing up there. Either way, whether you take yourself to wash it up there or bring the bowl back to wash up at the camp, it's a bit of a faff to clean your cups and your plates and things. It's a faff. You also have to consider how you're going to store your food. Obviously at home, in your kitchen, you have a fridge and a freezer, so you can, on a hot day or a hot week, keep all your food nice and fresh, but when you are camping, you have to think about the fact that you are not going to have a fridge and a freezer. So what you probably will have is a cool box and you have these ice packs or ice blocks, sometimes they're called. And every day you take these ice packs or ice blocks to reception and ask if you can put them in the freezer. A lot of campsites will have a freezer where you can refreeze your ice packs. Hopefully you've got several ice packs so that you can keep changing them over and keep your cool box cool. But it's not as effective as a fridge. It's certainly not a fridge substitute, so you do have to be careful when thinking about what you're going to keep in your cool box. Don't take lots of meat and perishables to store for four days before cooking. That will end badly. So often, you're just eating out of tins and you are buying stuff from the local shop to eat on a daily basis. But outside of all the tricky logistics and all the hard work that goes into functioning when you are camping, the upsides of camping are fabulous. You're outdoors, you're breathing in the fresh air all day, every day, and you are waking up to the sounds of nature, you're often waking up at daybreak because you can't block out the dawn. You can't just close your curtains and keep the light out for a little bit longer. You are up with the sun and you tend to go to bed earlier as well. And you can also make a campfire, which is really exciting for everyone. Sitting around the campfire, toasting marshmallows on sticks. You don't have the distraction of a television and all the things in our everyday life that just takes us away from the things that matter, our relationships. You can just sit there contemplating life, looking up at the stars, communicating with loved ones, and connecting on a deeper level. This is what camping is all about. It's about connecting with each other, connecting with nature, and reconnecting with ourselves, rediscovering ourselves, and going back to basics. That's the beauty of camping, and if you are lucky, you'll be on a campsite in a really beautiful area, perhaps with a lake or a stream, or mountains, or coastline to go and explore. I have many fond memories of camping as a child. Just having so much fun, the freedom to run around outside, the chance to spend quality time with my family. Particularly with my mum, who otherwise was always very, very busy. It was nice to have her away from work and away from the distractions of running the household. As an adult, I haven't camped that much. I've been on a few little camping trips. Usually just one or two nights, often associated with parties or festivals. I went camping in France once on a surfing trip. That was good fun. I did lots of reading on that holiday, and surfing of course, I didn't go on a surfing holiday and just spend all my time reading. Having young children, I've only actually camped once with the kids. I think as they get older and they can help out a bit more, they're a bit more independent, we'll probably do more camping. But glamping is definitely on my to-do list now, and who knows, maybe I will fit in an impromptu camping trip this year. This podcast has made me feel quite nostalgic. I want to hear those zips again, and I want to trip over the guy lines. I'd love to know about your camping experience, so if you are watching this on YouTube, please do pop a comment below and share with us your camping experiences or any top tips that you have for the best family camping experience. If you are still listening, thank you so much for your time. I do hope that you will come back again so I can tickle your ear, eardrums. I was gonna say earbuds then. You don't have earbuds, you have, eardrums. Uh, I'd love to tickle your eardrums again. So, thanks for listening, and if you are still here and you're not yet subscribed or following, then please do hit that subscribe or follow button and uh, let's do this again. Until next time, take care and goodbye.