How to Describe Places in English!

So I'm out here at the lake today.

I love coming to the lake.

It's very, very relaxing.

Although the lake is a little bit out of the way.

In English, when you describe something as being out of the way,

it means that it's not on your normal road or street.

It's not necessarily a place that you drive by all the time.

For me, if I want to go to the lake, I have to decide to drive to the lake.

It's a little bit out of the way.

In this English lesson,

I'll help you learn seven more ways to describe places and locations.

And we'll go to seven more places as we do it.

By the way, this is Lake Erie at the end of this video, I'll show you Lake Ontario.

If you look behind me, you'll see some wind turbines.

They love to build wind turbines in remote locations.

That's definitely how I would describe the place I am in right now.

There are hardly any houses.

There's a small farm there.

There's no one even driving on the road.

No one really lives around here.

So they like to build wind turbines in remote locations,

places far from the city, far from houses and far from people.

So let's say I was driving and I realized that my van was almost out of gas.

If I was on this street here and I asked someone if there's a gas

station nearby, they might say, Yeah, there's one just around the corner.

As I get to the end of this road, if I turn and show you,

it's a little bit far away.

But you can see there is a gas station just around the corner.

This is how we describe something that's just one street away and one turn away.

Often cities are designed with a grid pattern

and someone might have a nice park just around the corner

or a nice little convenience store just around the corner.

Or in this situation, a gas station just around the corner.

So I'm standing here on the main street of this town.

It's not too busy right now because it's early in the morning,

but I wanted to show you that there is a McDonald's across the street from me.

They put McDonald's on the main streets

of most towns because they want them to be easy to get to.

In English, when we describe a place or location

as easy to get to, we mean usually that it's on a main road.

It's not hidden down a really curvy road in a funny part of town.

It's usually somewhere really easy to find, somewhere

that's really easy to get to, somewhere that's really convenient.

So I'm just parked on the side of the road here.

My farm is just down the road or just up the road.

We use those two phrases interchangeably in English, or at least I do.

I'm about a kilometer from my house.

My farm is just down the road or just up the road.

In fact, I'm standing in front of

what used to be the house where my uncle and aunt lived.

So I used to say my uncle and aunt lived just up the road or

my uncle and aunt lived just down the road.

It's a way we describe a place or location

that's close and obviously on the same road where we live.

By the way, if you're in the city,

you would use just up the street or just down the street.

I use road because I live out in the country.

I think the house behind me is a great example of a place where

I would use the word secluded to describe it.

When we say that a place is secluded, we mean that it's far from everyone else.

I usually use it to describe things like houses like this.

If I turn, you'll see that we're on a dirt road, we sometimes

call it a gravel road, and we're kind of in the middle of farm country.

This house is very secluded.

It's very private.

We would also describe it as being tucked away

or nestled in amongst all of these trees.

It's probably a really quiet, peaceful place to live.

Maybe you have a secluded cabin that you go to in the woods.

Maybe there's a little secluded cottage that you rent sometimes on a lake

that's far from all the other cottages and people.

And that's how we would describe it, as secluded.

As many of you know, I live out in the country.

When I was younger, when I was in university, sometimes

my friends from university would come to visit me

and they would jokingly say, “Wow, Bob, you live in the middle of nowhere!”

In English, when we say that someone lives in the middle of nowhere, it's

kind of a funny way, basically, to say that they live far from everything,

that their place is a little bit difficult to find.

Back then there wasn't GPS either, so it must have been a real challenge

for my friends

who were coming from the city to find me because I live in the middle of nowhere.

When I showed you the McDonald's,

I said it was easy to get to, easy to find, convenient.

I would say the opposite for this small restaurant behind me.

I would describe this as off the beaten path or off the beaten track.

There's two versions of that phrase.

As you can see, we're not in a town.

We're not in a city.

We're kind of out here in the countryside.

But this place is really, really, really cool.

It has really yummy ice cream.

It has all kinds of cool treats that you can buy.

So even though it's off the beaten path or off the beaten track, I would say

it's definitely worthwhile to come here, especially for the ice cream.

So it might not look like it, but there's actually a trail here

that goes to the lake, but it's a little bit hard to find.

In fact, a friend told me about this trail and that's exactly how he described it.

You can see

there's a lot of brush laying here and it doesn't look like there's a trail

because it's hard to find in English when you say something is hard to find.

By the way, there's the little entrance way right here.

It means exactly that.

It means that it's challenging or difficult to find it.

It's not easy to find this trail, but once you do find it, it's pretty cool

because if you walk down it, it goes all the way to the lake.

Well, here we go.

As promised, we're at Lake Ontario.

We started the day at Lake Erie, and we're ending the day at Lake Ontario.

I hope you enjoyed all of the views and places along the way.

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Give me a thumbs up if this video helped you learn just a little bit more English

and I hope you have a great week of English learning. Bye.