Daily Dose of English 53
Road Trips
Daily Dose of English 53
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about road trips. We're sort of continuing the theme from yesterday, talking about driving, to talk about a form of driving that I think is quite nice and pretty interesting, because it's not a super common thing. It is, I guess. We'll talk about it. Road trips. So road trips are a very common thing for Americans all over the country, and it's when you go on a trip or vacation, usually with your family or with your friends, and a big part of that is driving. And so you drive somewhere relatively far away over the course of several days, and you road trip. And this is not that common in other parts of the world, partly just because of how large the United States is. The US is the third or fourth largest country in the world, I think. I think China, Canada, and Russia are bigger in terms of land area. However, Russia and Canada are full of tons of very, very, very cold locations and lots of parts that nobody ever goes to. And so they don't really count as being that large in terms of like explorable area. And China also has a bunch of deserts and parts where people don't really go and visit. However, there are tons of big cities and that sort of thing. But the US is sort of unique that there's a lot of things all over the country. Unless you count like Alaska, which is really far away, the rest of the country is connected and easy to get to. And I guess Hawaii is also far away. But every other of the 48 states, what we call the continental United States, so all the states that are part of the continent, which excludes, I don't really know why it excludes Africa, Alaska, not Africa, because that's a different continent entirely. Alaska and Hawaii are not part of the contigual US or whatever the word is, something like that. But those 48 states are very connected and really easy to travel between. The next, I guess, commonplace to do this is in like Europe as a whole, because you can go between countries in the European Union really easily. However, it's not exactly the same, because one, it's not even that big, right? Europe is actually quite pretty small compared to the United States. And because you're also crossing between countries that are very, very different. However, when you travel between states in the US on a road trip, there are differences that are pretty big, but it still feels like the US, right? It doesn't feel like you're entering a new country where there's a new language and there's new customs and different culture completely. It's just there's different shades of the United States. Some of them are quite distinct and different, and you can usually tell where you are if you were like randomly appeared in one state. You could guess pretty easily like, okay, this feels a lot more like the Northeast, which is New England, or this feels a lot more like California or something like that. But a lot of things are the same in lots of ways, right? We use the same currency, the same language, the same road signs. Everything like that is pretty much the same. But a lot of people grow up going on road trips as one of their main ways that their family travels, especially if they're from a part of the country where the states are closer together. So not from Texas, because Texas is so big. And a lot of people go on road trips and they visit family or friends or just see other states pretty frequently. I went on road trips fairly often with my family, pretty much every summer, more or less. And we would go to usually a couple of different places, but it didn't change that much. We would usually drive to California because I'm from Oregon, which is the state above California. And we would drive down to California to see some family in a couple of different parts like Lake Tahoe and, um, Oh, I forget the other place. San Jose. That's what it's called. San Jose and Lake Tahoe were the two big locations that we'd go to relatively frequently. California is big. California is very, very large. It is much larger than many countries, especially in Europe where the countries are pretty small. And so going from the north of Oregon all the way down to sort of central California is 12, 15 hours. Right. It's a long drive. And so there was many summers where we would drive for two solid days of like eight hours per day just to get where we wanted to go. And we'd often stop off in different places and go get food or go do something interesting. Um, I remember one place called Mount Shasta where there's really, really clean, clear water. It's like this, uh, sort of a natural, uh, spring of water. And we'd stop there on basically every road trip and we'd fill up, um, our water bottles and drink water and hang out. Cause it's just a really lovely place. And I remember the water tasting really, really good. And that's like a sort of a midway point, I guess, between where we would go and where we were from and where we'd go. There's other stop off places that I remember more like, but they're more like restaurants and things along the highway. Because since there is this culture of road tripping or going on road trips, there's a lot of roadside attractions is something that we call them or roadside restaurants or things to do on the highway. You would go by somewhere and there's just one store and that's it, right? That's all you can see is a store that's in the middle of the highway, but you can stop there and buy something or see something interesting. One that I remember is there's a jerky store. Jerky is dried meat and dried and cured meat. So you can eat the meat just like it is and it lasts forever. We call that jerky. And there's a jerky store that had jerky from basically every animal you can think of. You can get a moose jerky. You can get bear jerky. You can get alligator jerky. You can even get kangaroo jerky. Then you can also find the typical beef jerky, chicken jerky, just so many kinds of jerky. And that's all they sold. That's all that this place had. They had, I guess, little other things like little candies or uh, cables to plug in your phone or things like that that are useful. But 95% of the store was just various types of jerky and dried meats, which is so weird. Like, I don't know who thinks of themselves that I want to open a jerky store. That's what, that's what I want to do. Uh, but it was interesting, I guess, like you can get so many different kinds of jerky in this random, uh, store on the side of a highway. But another really common one is restaurants or diners are also really common on road trips because they're pretty quick and easy and they have what's called comfort food. Comfort food is something that you can eat basically anywhere in the country because people, okay, wait, hang on. That's not the definition of comfort food. Comfort food is something that makes you feel happy and comforted like you're at home or like you're with your family because it's familiar. And you can find sort of American comfort food, like in diners, basically anywhere in the United States because it's just something that's been around and so many people think about diner food as being something sort of comforting. It's not the best food, but that's not the point of comfort food. Comfort food is something that you enjoy because it's familiar or nostalgic is a good word to describe it. So nostalgia or nostalgic is something that reminds you of the past, of your past, and you think fondly of something, which makes you enjoy that thing more, even though it might actually not be very good, right? So a lot of people have nostalgia for old movies that they grew up watching that actually weren't very good movies or food, right? Like comfort food. Maybe whatever kind of food isn't actually that good, but it feels nice just because it reminds you of a different time of your life. That's nostalgia. Um, anyways, we're starting to finish up here in this, uh, in this episode. And so I want to finish up by talking a little bit about more about road trips because they, they can be pretty fun, right? A lot of people go on them for fun and they're enjoyable and you put on music and you just drive and you hang out and you see interesting things. You play games, you talk, and then you get somewhere interesting. You do something in a day and then you go and you keep going. Lots of people have done week long or two weeks to go between a bunch of different states, right? Their road trip is to go see five, six, seven, eight states and enjoy different cities and food and maybe go to see music or events or something like that. And so don't think that road trips are necessarily just really far and it's all about drive, drive, drive, right? A lot of people really enjoy road tripping because it is, it can be really fun activity to do with friends or with your family. But anyway, let me know down in the comments, have you gone on a road trip before? Is it a common thing in your country? But that's everything for this episode today. I hope that you enjoyed it and maybe learned a few words here and there, but I will see you again tomorrow for the next episode. Have a good one. Bye.
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