The Great British Campout with Go Outdoors
AD – This post is in collaboration with Go Outdoors
Over the last 10 weeks, despite being a family who love the great outdoors, like many households across the UK, we have been trying to make the most of our time at home. Despite its many challenges, we’ve been trying to embrace the positives – spending time together as a family of four and doing whatever we can to create some sense of normality for the girls. We have marked a few different occasions together during lockdown (including my 37th birthday) and were keen to maintain that sense of celebration, even if the world did feel a little bit strange outside these four walls.
During lockdown, Go Outdoors made a wise and ethical decision to reverse their normal message, instead encouraging the general public to follow the message of staying at home and keeping safe during lockdown.
During the first May bank holiday and 75th VE Day Celebrations, Go Outdoors aptly renamed themselves Go Indoors and teamed up with The Great British Campout to help money for NHS Charities Together. The target was originally set at £1000, and to date has raised over £170,000!
As someone who was super keen to celebrate VE Day and pay homage to our ancestors, The Great British Campout and Go Outdoors VE weekend festival felt like the ideal way to create a party feel at home with the girls – I was super keen to get involved. I had already ordered some Union Jack bunting, planned a special VE Day afternoon tea and suggested some celebratory party games, but Go Outdoors certainly helped with the rest!
Spanning from Friday to Sunday, Go Outdoors created a fab line up of activities to keep the entire family entertained from morning yoga, to crafts for the kids, as well as celebrity cook alongs, stories and quizzes.
We were really, really lucky with the weather, so decided to join in not only with some of the quizzes, but also the cook a long sessions with none other than Greg Rutherford!
Mike is a HUGE fan of a family barbecue and despite having a huge garden which is the perfect base to spend warm Spring and Summer evenings, we have never had one in this house before! Now, having had at least 5 barbecues since, we have been left wondering what took us so long!
Go Outdoors have a great range of barbecues and barbecue accessories such as this Weber charcoal bbq which will also be perfect for larger family get togethers (when we finally get to have them again!) and they kindly gifted us one from their range.
The Weber Bar-B-Kettle Charcoal Kettle has a large steel cooking grate, porcelain enamelled bowl and lid and a no rust aluminium ash catcher for minimal mess – allowing Mike to focus on the important part – serving up the grub!
Mike, who now considers himself to be the King of the BBQ, absolutely loved cooking us all up some burgers and chicken skewers and doing the cook-along live with Greg Rutherford on the Go outdoors Facebook page. It really helped to bring a sense of community from the fact that many other households across the country were doing the exact same thing at the same time and it actually felt quite humbling!
We all sat around the table together, tucking into fab smokey bbq food, passing round the ketchup whilst our Union Jack bunting blew in the breeze and right there, for just a moment, we were able to forget about all the scary things going on in the world and celebrate, just as our grandparents would have done at street party and gatherings at the end of the 2nd World War.
With full tummies and happy hearts, we watched the Queen’s Speech at 9pm before joining our neighbours (socially distanced of course) for a sing a long of Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again. I found the whole day strangely emotional and that sense of community was still so strong, despite us being physically apart.
With the Spring weather being kind to us at the moment, we’ve gone on to have a fair few family BBQ’s since, and an unexpected positive of lockdown has been this TIME.
Whilst none of us would have chosen to have a 2020 quite like this one and my heart goes out to every single family who has lost a loved one too soon, the majority of us have so much to be thankful for. Because unlike the generations before us, who were sent out to fight and who’s children were separated from their families, we have no bombings, no blackouts or air raid shelters and  the luxury of technology and to help us stay connected. We can help save the world just by staying at home.
So for now, despite the easing of the lockdown and life slowly edging its way back to ‘normal’, we will be staying indoors just a bit longer, embracing more of this time we’ve been given, and enjoying those precious family moments.
I hope that when the girls look back and tell their own children about the lockdown of 2020, these are the moments they remember.
Lucy xxx
