The Covid boom in pet ownership has led to operators offering plenty of pet-friendly accommodation. But is it really such a good idea?
Go on holiday without your best friend? For growing numbers of dog owners, it’s unthinkable.
Holiday operators have seen a big jump in guests booking accommodation that accepts dogs in recent months, and the trend is set to accelerate this year.
Continue reading...With travel restrictions in place, campervans provide a way of travelling with the family and are currently very popular in Hidaka of Saitama prefecture, a suburb to the west of Tokyo
Continue reading...Wood-fire cooking isn’t just for sausages and marshmallows, Harry Fisher says, and lockdown is no excuse for not upping your campfire-cuisine game
Usually, plenty of Australians would be starting to make plans for summer camping trips about now. Others would already be on them, having escaped the southern states for long soirees north where winter is little more than a horror story told to scare kids at night.
A significant proportion of those people, though – and maybe you, reading this – are stuck at home dreaming of the warmth and crying into their beer while watching Netflix, thanks to ongoing lockdowns and border closures.
Continue reading...Armed with long experience, our writer gives the lowdown on getting there, the best equipment and picking your spot for a great night in the wild
When I bivvy I’m not in search of sleep. I know I’ll wake up frequently, feeling restricted by my sleeping bag. Bivvying is camping at its simplest: sleeping outside without a tent and minimal gear.
It isn’t about a comfortable night’s rest. It’s about squeezing an adventure into a humdrum week; it’s about being in nature, hearing hedgehogs snuffling and waking to the dawn chorus. It’s a short, sharp dose of escapism that has become even more restorative in the past 15 months. And, while I’ve bivvyed on Dartmoor, on Scotland’s west coast and in places in-between, most of the time I’ve been within 10 miles of my home in Bournemouth.
Continue reading...Lockdown and the loss of both parents have transformed the entertainer. He talks about the disappointments of TV, outgrowing his comic persona – and his move into the glamping business
I remember the buzz around Johnny Vegas at the Edinburgh fringe in 1997. Everyone knew a star was being born – but a star of what, exactly? No one had ever seen anything quite like this overweight northerner, screaming and sobbing at his audience, raging at life’s injustices – then breaking off for another bout at his potter’s wheel. Was this comedy, ceramics or a Lancastrian on the verge of a breakdown?
But the oddity – that defiance of categories – couldn’t sustain a career. A handful of years after becoming the first newcomer to be nominated for the Edinburgh comedy award, Vegas went mainstream as a man with a monkey sidekick in an ad campaign for the pay-TV service ITV Digital. People shouted “moonkeh” (St Helens accent not optional) at him in the street. He became – and remains – a well-loved household name, albeit for a brand of (hoarse, boozy) comedy that part-obscures what made him extraordinary in the first place.
Continue reading...Many middle-aged American women are selling up and shipping out, taking to the roads alone in their mobile homes
Sarah Gabriel found her life’s meaning in a small town in Kansas on a cold autumn morning in 2020. It was the hour before dawn in a Walmart car park and the 63-year-old rolled back the strip of floor underlay that serves as makeshift curtains on the windows of her 2008 Honda minivan to the awesome sight of a full moon looming above the spectral white of Walmart’s security lights.
“Here I was in Kansas, you know, like Dorothy, and the moon was doing her thing like I was doing my thing,” she recalls. “‘Hey Sarah,’ she seemed to say, ‘you’re in your seventh decade and now it’s time for your big adventure.’”
Continue reading...Campaigners say unprecedented levels of littering and fly-camping are partly due to ignorance of behavioural guidelines
An unprecedented rise in litter, damaging fires and “fly-camping” across the English countryside is partly a result of the government spending less than £2,000 a year over the past decade on promoting the Countryside Code, campaigners say.
The code, a set of simple guidelines to help rural visitors respect wildlife, local people and landscapes, was relaunched in England in 2004 after the new “right to roam” law increased access to the countryside.
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