Oh, you are in for a treat today. Hello everyone. It's Anna here. This is The English Like a Native Podcast. And today I decided to go back to what I used to do when I first started this podcast and deliver something completely off the cuff. I do know the topic of what we're talking about at least, but I am otherwise unprepared. But that doesn't mean you should switch off. That doesn't mean that you should put your phone away and find something better to do because I promise you I'm going to be giving you some very interesting phrases, phrasal verbs and idioms when talking about preparing to travel. In particular, preparing to go on holiday. Now, In the UK, we say holiday, not vacation. Vacation is a very common word in American English, and maybe even in other varieties of English, but in British English, when we take that break away in another country, having a fun time with our family or our friends, that is a holiday. We also use the word holiday to describe seasonal celebrations like the Christmas holidays, with an S, or the Easter holidays. So, planning a holiday, and then going on holiday. In a week's time, I am going to go to France. We have a family wedding coming up, so we decided rather than just go over for a few days, we would take a week away and enjoy a few days in France, which I'm very excited about. We're going down to the south of France. Now, the first thing you need to do when you are preparing for a holiday is to book the flights and accommodation. Maybe you're not flying. Maybe you need to book tickets for a ferry or for, I don't know, what other means are there? For the train. There we go. Maybe you need to book train tickets or ferry tickets or perhaps you're going on a cruise if you're lucky enough. But I will be flying to France. So we need to book flights and accommodation. Now, I didn't actually have to do any of that because in my household, I tend to be the one responsible for the packing and my partner is usually the one responsible for organising the travel and the accommodation and even the car hire. That's another thing. He's very good at dealing with that, finding the best deals. He likes to search and compare and to dive into the nitty gritty of the different offerings. I find it quite boring and I tend to just jump at the first thing that's on offer. Sure, we'll take that. So it's not always the best deal, but I just don't want to spend too much time researching. My partner, however, is the researcher. So he does the booking of flights and accommodation. So our flights are booked, our accommodation is booked, and actually, we're not staying in a hotel. We're going to be staying in a villa, which is fantastic because all the family, the extended family, are all going to be together. And so I think we have this like 20 room villa or something that we're going to be staying in, which is very exciting. Now I said, I'm the one who does the packing mostly because I'm the one in charge of all the laundry in the house. So I know where all the clothes are, I can make sure everything is clean on time, and so it makes sense that I'm the one who packs everybody's clothes for the holiday. I say everybody's, I mean me and the children, I don't pack my partner's clothes. He does his own. So we have a couple of little suitcases for the boys. They're a brand called Trunky, which the boys love. They've got little faces on them and they've got wheels. So the boys can actually sit on them and ride them along. So they have their little Trunkies, which just about fit in the hand luggage, so we can actually take them onto the plane with us. And then we have a giant family suitcase for everything else. So I need to pack the suitcases and I'll always make a list of essentials that we mustn't forget. And those are things like your toothbrush, which is normally the last thing to go into your bag. Passports. Oh, that's another thing you have to do in advance. You have to check your passport expiry date. You don't want to get to the airport and realise that your passport has expired or that your passport is about to expire because I think there's a rule that you can't travel if your passport is close to expiring. I've got it in my head that it might even be six months. If it's within the last six months, then you have to get it renewed. Maybe I'm wrong. But I'm sure I've read that somewhere. But besides packing the suitcase, booking the flights and the accommodation, you also have to plan your itinerary. I can never say that word, itinerary, itinerary, itinerary, there we go, itinerary, oh, it's such a mouthful. Basically, you have to plan the things that you're going to do when you're there. For France, actually, apart from the wedding. We have no plans. We're just going to go with it. We're going to go wherever the wind takes us. We'll see what happens when we get there. And mostly we just want to relax and spend time with the family. In many cases, you have to make sure you have a visa and travel insurance because that's something else that you don't want to be without. If you go on holiday and something terrible happens and you don't have travel insurance, then that could be a nightmare. So, what do we do? Well, after packing, when we're ready, we're going to set off. And this is one of our first phrasal verbs. We are going to set off. To set off is to start on your journey. Often we tend to take the cheapest flight, which usually leaves at something like 6 or 7am, which means we have to get up at 3am to then take the journey to the airport, get parked up, and then check in in order to get to the flight on time for a 7am departure. So we set off at 7am. early. And when we get to the airport, of course, we have to check in. To check in is our second phrasal verb. There's going to be five of them, by the way. To check in is to register, to say, I'm here. And often that's when you book in your baggage as well. So they'll weigh your baggage or your luggage and they'll send it off to hopefully be loaded onto your plane and arrive at your destination with you on time. So set off, check in. And then when you get to the other side, you normally have to pick up your rental car. Many people prefer to have a little bit of independence when they're in another country. Having a car is quite useful for going and doing lots of different things. So you normally pick up your car at the airport at your destination and then you have a fun time trying to figure out how to drive in another country because when you drive in the UK, of course, you're on the left side of the road. When you go to another country, nine times out of 10, you're gonna be driving on the right side of the road and everything feels different. The worst thing is when you come to a junction or a roundabout and then you go a different way around the roundabout. It's very stressful. I tend to let Nick do the driving when we are on holiday. So you set off, you check in at the airport. And you get to the other end, you pick up your rental car, and by this point, you really start to look forward to the holiday because the hard part's done, you're there. So now you can really start looking forward to enjoying the holiday that's ahead of you. To look forward to is our next phrasal verb. This means to be excited about something in the future. So, you look forward to it. Now the last phrasal verb I'm going to give you just generally describes a holiday. And this might be the reason that you give to people when they say, why did you decide to come here? Or what are you doing here? Did you come specifically to see a tourist attraction? To visit the city or to visit a friend, what did you come here for? You might say, we just needed to get away from England for a while. We just needed to get away from the unpredictable weather in the UK. That's all, we just wanted to get away from the hustle and bustle. And we even can call our holiday a getaway. So there we go, five phrasal verbs. Set off, check in, pick up, look forward to, and get away. Okay, so I did also promise you idioms. And so one of the idioms that I use quite a lot when travelling with the children, although I don't always live up to it, is my attempt to travel light. To travel light. This means that you take very few things with you when you travel. So you travel light. Maybe you don't take a suitcase at all, you just take a backpack. Many years ago, when I went to Argentina for three weeks, my partner and I literally just took a backpack each for three weeks! That was really crazy. I don't know how we did it. I remember smelling quite bad. I remember washing things in the sink of different hostels, just trying to clean my clothes to some extent. If you're lucky, then you might find a nice place to stay, which is in the middle of nowhere. In the middle of nowhere. This is our next idiom. And this means a place that's far away from activity. Far away from towns and cities. So you may have a lodge or a cabin in the middle of nowhere. That's some people's idea of hell, some people's idea of paradise. What is it to you? You may go away specifically because you want to catch some rays. This is our next idiom. To catch some rays means to sunbathe. If you've been any amount of time in the UK, then you'll know that we don't have that much sun. We just have, you know, like little bursts of sunshine or a couple of days of sunshine and then it's back to cold, grey, rainy days. That's why this country is so green because we have a lot of rain and so going on holiday gives you a good chance of catching some rays. Now, when I go on holiday, I don't like to visit the tourist hotspots. I'm not a big fan of the hotspots because I don't like being in big crowds of people. I prefer to go off the beaten path. I prefer to go to the places that aren't very commonly visited. I prefer to get to the heart of a place to find the true identity of a place, and you can't find that in the tourist areas. Like when I'm going into London, I never go to where the tourists go. That's not true London, that's a commercial version of London. So I like to go off the beaten path. That's our next idiom, off the beaten path. And before, before any of this happens, I will use my last idiom. You will hit the road. And hit the road just means that you're going to start a journey. So it might be that you've gone off the beaten path for the day. Or all your friends have gone to catch some rays at the beach, but you went off into the middle of nowhere to go off the beaten path and find something exciting. And you did. You found a wonderful lake and some locals having a wonderful time. They invite you to come and have a picnic with them. You spend the day with them and then eventually you say,"I'm sorry guys, it's getting late. I'm going to have to hit the road." So I'm going to have to go. Usually you hit the road because you have an appointment or because you want to miss the traffic or something like that. There's normally some pressing reason for you to want to hit the road. So there you go. Let me recap those idioms. We had travel light. In the middle of nowhere, catch some rays, off the beaten path, and hit the road. Okay, so I would love to know more about the holiday or holidays that you have booked in 2024. I mean, if you are listening to this in 2025, 2026 or beyond, then I welcome you to tell me about your year's plans, but this year, what are your holiday plans? Please tell me where are you going? How long are you going there for? And what's the plan? Are you going to do something that's popular with tourists? Are you going to go off the beaten path? Are you just going to go and catch some rays? Tell me all about it. If you're listening on a streaming platform like Spotify, then you can simply click on the link that says,"Send me a text" and you can message me. Or if you're watching on YouTube, of course, pop a note down in the comment section. Thank you so much for listening and I'll speak to you again very soon. Until then, take care and goodbye.