Learn Australian English in this Walking with Pete episode of the Aussie English Podcast where I talk about my recent road trip down to Sorrento in Victoria, Australia and more!

AE 450 – Walking with Pete: Sorrento Road Trip

Alright, guys. What is going on? Welcome to this episode of Walking with Pete. It has been a little while, it has been a little while, and that is because I’ve been doing a lot of these vlogs, right? So, I guess they kind of cross over quite a bit with Walking with Pete, as a lot of the time these blogs are me outside walking around.

Anyway, it’s 11… almost 11:30am. Been working at home this morning. Put up a new vlog where I went into Canberra and had some burgers with Kel. So, Australia’s Best Burgers. This is probably my favorite burger joint ever. I really recommend checking out Grease Monkey if you’re gonna come to Canberra. Some free advertising for them. But yeah, I love chicken burgers and you guys will see that in this… in this vlog, and there’s heaps and heaps of good… I guess, vocab and expressions, and you get to see me order the burgers and the beers, and how I interact with people when I’m ordering food or drink. .

Anyway, so I did that this morning, and now I’m just outside in the charming Canberra weather. It’s one of those… one of those places, it’s so strange because you walk outside and in the shade it’s cold, but the moment the sun hits you it’s really warm. So, I don’t know if you guys have experienced that before, but I don’t know, there’s quite a few places like that especially in southern Australia, the lower portion of Australia, where in the sun it tends to be really, really hot. I don’t know if that’s like the movie from the sunlight that warms your skin up. But then, in the shade it’s really cold. It’s always hard to decide what to wear. I always bring a jacket when I go for a walk like this to get coffee and if the sun comes out I get really hot and I want to take it off and as soon as the sun disappears, I want to put it back on. So, pays to be prepared. It pays to be prepared.

Just let me cross the road here. So, I’m going for a walk to grab some coffee, because I like to get out of the house, try to be a bit active, do some exercise, not just sit on the couch all day long every day, which is definitely one of those things that becomes easier and easier to do the older you get, right? And especially, if you’re working from home, it becomes easier and easier to find excuses not to go outside, and instead to stay on the couch all day in and work away. And so, every day, I’m trying to come out and get coffee, and head down to… head down to the local cafe here, which is… which is really good. I really like going down here. There’s some great… some great coffee from this place. I think it’s called Plunge, which is in Belconnen, in Canberra.

Anyway so, I thought I do a Walking with Pete episode today, guys. Hopefully, the cars in the background isn’t too loud. Sorry about that. We’ll get past them eventually. And I thought I would talk to you about my weekend. I had a really interesting weekend for multiple different reasons.

So, Kel and I went down to Sorrento, which is a beachside town in the south east of Victoria. It’s sort of near Melbourne. It’s probably about an hour and a half’s drive outside of Melbourne. But obviously, for us it was a lot longer than an hour and a half considering we were coming down from Canberra. So, Kel found out that she had Monday off so we could do a long weekend, ’cause it’s not really worth going all the way down to Melbourne from Canberra, which is a… probably an eight to nine hour drive if you’re not going to spend a significant amount of time there, right? Like, if we go down as usual and we leave on a Friday afternoon, we will arrive in Melbourne from Canberra at about midnight so probably at 12:00 p.m., it takes about eight to nine hours. We’ll get Saturday and if we don’t have a long weekend, we have to drive back on Sunday. So, we have to leave at about 9:00 a.m. in the morning, which means we get back at about 6:00 in the afternoon. And so, you only really get Saturday to hang out, and obviously, you can’t really have too much for late one at night, on Saturday night, ’cause you’ve got to get up early on Sunday to drive home. So, that’s why we tend to try and make sure we get long weekends, and then we drive down. So, that we at least get two days to hang out and do our thing and spend time with friends and family. And so, fortunately, this weekend that’s what happened. So, Kel had the Monday off. We drove down after work on Friday, I think, we got down there, again, at about 11:30, maybe, we got there a little earlier. Went inland. So, we took the inland road. That’s a little quicker than the one that is somewhat closer to the coast, which goes around the mountain range. There’s a mountain range in… along the east coast of Australia, and so going from Canberra to Melbourne you can go either side of that mountain range, and the inland side is quicker by about an hour, and the outside version takes an extra hour, though, the scenery is a lot nicer. You get to go up and down through the hills. You get to see trees and the farms are a lot nicer, but the… it’s not the… it’s not the same freeway, right? So, you can’t travel this quickly. That’s why it takes longer. It’s not 110 kilometres the whole way. It maxes out at about 100 k’s for most of it on the east… the coast road.

Anyway, so we drove down there and we got to stay at a Bed and Breakfast. So, dad got in contact probably in the last few years with a friend of his from his primary school. So, this lady… dad and her, they’ve known each other longer than anyone else who was there, right? So, they had been friends when they were like 5 years old at primary school, and so, they got back in touch at a… I think it was a school reunion or something like that a few years ago, and dad’s a photographer so he went over there for a weekend, I think, with Mum for their anniversary earlier this year, and in exchange for being able to stay there, dad did the photography of the house for the website, because the the lady that let us stay there, who owns this house, needed some really nice photos for the for the website.

I’m just looking at the ground. There’s horse poo on the ground. That’s really weird. I don’t know why there would be a horse walking around in Canberra. It’s very strange.

Anyway, so yeah, he got to do that at the start of the year and sort of, you know, reform this relationship with her, and it was my mother’s birthday this weekend on the 28th. So, my mum’s trying to make it a yearly sort of tradition now where every time it’s her birthday, the… she likes getting everyone together and going away on a holiday. So, last year we went to Lord Howe Island, which was really beautiful. This year, obviously, we went to Sorrento. Who knows where we’ll go next year. But yeah, it was really cool, and we got to stay there for free in the end. Well, I mean, not… you know, my parents were paying for the place anyway. They didn’t expect us to come down, because we didn’t find out about having a long weekend end to the week… I think, last week, during the week we found out and were suddenly like, “Oh, by the way, we’re going to come down and see you guys in Sorrento.”, and it just happened that the place they’re staying at has extra room. So, we got to stay there.

It was really good though. It was really good. I got to hang out with Antica and Rory, my sister and her partner, as well as their daughter Isabel who’s growing up really, really quickly, though, she’s a… she’s a bit of a cry-baby at the moment. She has a lot of tantrums. She gets a little cranky quite a lot at the moment. .

And So yeah, we chilled out there for two days, three days, and just enjoyed this beautiful old house that had like wooden… wooden walls and timber roofs and really nice furniture. So, it was really cool to hang out there. I had one of my friends as well drive down from Melbourne. He came to see us. .

Sorry About the noise, guys. I’m just crossing the highway so it’s probably really loud, but I’m trying to talk closer to the mic. Good practice listening comprehension.

Alright. Let’s try that again. Let’s try that again. I’ve gotten to the other side of the road so it should be a little quieter now.

Anyway, so yeah. So, we went… we drove down. But oh, there was a funny thing that happened whilst Kel and I were driving down. Obviously, when we’re driving down, we need to stop, you know. You need a toilet break. You need to get food. You need to get drinks. And we kind of stocked up on quite a bit of food from the house. You know, we tried to save a bit of money by making some sandwiches and just, you know, taking anything else out of the cupboard or the pantry that was perishable or that was food that needed to be eaten, and taking taking that with us to eat on the road. I also went to the shops and grabbed some nuts and berries and stuff. I love doing that. And so yeah, oh, we’re driving down, right? So, we’re driving down, I need to go to the toilet, I need to take a pee, and then, we stop at this place, this tiny, tiny, tiny little town somewhere and there’s the toilet there, the dunny, the loo. We get out to go to the toilet, come out, get back in the car, and this bogan… bogan-mobile, this car that was definitely owned by a bogan. And if you guys don’t know what a bogan is, it’s kind of like an uncouth, unsophisticated person in Australia. So, usually someone who isn’t very educated, swears in public, spits, drinks in public. It’s just does all these kind of socially unacceptable things, but has no problem doing them in front of people in public. And, you know, it tends to make people revile a little bit, like sort of “ehhhh!”. Anyway so, this guy drives up in a ute, typical ute, bogans tend to love utes. He drives in effectively doing a burnout, parks his car, and then, I’m thinking, you know, “Ok, he’s got to go to the toilet really badly that’s why he’s doing this.”, and so, he drives up and he ends up parking on, I think it was a disabled parking spot too, which is a big no-no in Australia. If there’s these blue symbols that are wheelchairs on, I guess, carparks where you can’t park, because they’re for disabled people. And he parked on top of that and jumped out of the car metres away from the toilet, right? Five metres away and just whips out his kit, I don’t want to say it, and just starts urinating right there, just starts taking a leak on the spot right in front of the toilet.

And sort of like, you’ve driven all this way, you’ve come off the highway, you’ve parked your car right in front of the dunnies only to get out of your car and take a piss in front of the toilets whilst your girlfriend goes into the toilet?! So, that was interesting. Kel was kind of like sitting there going, “What the fuck!? What the fuck is going on? Why is this dude like this?”. And I’m justsort of like, “That’s bogans in Australia, Kel. That’s… Some people just do not give a fuck. They do not care.”.

Okay, alright. So, that was one interesting event that happened on the way down to Ocean Grove. Another funny thing that happened this week was that I was sitting in bed with Kel, I think, the night before we were going to drive down to to Melbourne, and I didn’t realise, but my phone, I have got an Apple phone, right, and I’ve got an iMac computer, and I don’t know what happened. I updated them recently and now every time I get a phone call on my phone, it comes up on the computer and I can answer it on the computer. So, we were sitting in bed and I was just working on some stuff. I think Kel was asleep and Mum suddenly calls, and it’s like, you know, 10 o’clock at night and I’m like, “Oh, this can’t be good.”. So, I answer the phone and I’m like, “Hey, Mum, How’s it going?”, and she’s like, “Ah, nanna’s broken her hip.”. I’m like… and I don’t mean to laugh, you know, I’m not… it’s not funny, because she’s hurt herself, but it’s funny, because it’s a very stereotypical thing for old people to experience where they fall over and break their hip, and my grandmother’s just, you know, these… it’s just how could this have happened to her kind of thing. It’s like, oh my gosh, drama after drama, right, like problem after problem.

Anyway. So, apparently they’d gone to, my grandfather and my grandmother, had gone to see their accountant, I guess, during the week, and my nanna had been walking down some stairs and the rail that you hold onto while you walked down some stairs stopped early before the end of the stairs. And so, she thought she was at the bottom, but she wasn’t. And so, she took a step and ended up falling out of… or over onto her side and broke her hip. The funny thing… the funny part about it, my nanna’s really stubborn and doesn’t like being a bother, right? She doesn’t like people helping her. And so, she had fallen over, broken hip, didn’t realize she’d broken the hip, and was just like, “Oh, she’ll be right” and tried to get back up, and obviously, couldn’t. Gets help back into the car by some people and my grandfather, and when they get home, nanna still didn’t realise that she’d broken yet, and was just like, “Oh, I’m just going to rest, you know, and the bruising will go down and it’ll be fine.”. So, they call it my uncle who funnily enough used to sell hip replacements. He comes over and he knows instantly, “Yeah, her hip’s broken.”. And so, she’s had to go to hospital. She’s had to have surgery pretty much that day. She… Fortunately, she didn’t need a hip replacement or anything. They just… it was the knob, the end of the socket joint on the femur that leg bone that had broken off. And so, I think they just use some metal and stuck it back in, you know, reattached it to the bone. And so, she’s got to rehab now and we’re just hoping she does the rehab properly and we’ll be okay. But that was, yeah, another thing. They were meant to be coming down to the birthday with my mum down in Sorrento, but obviously couldn’t, because nanna was in hospital. So, just another strange, funny, accidental, coincidental thing that occurred. Yeah. It was an interesting weekend.

And so, aside from that, guys, I guess, you know, this Sorrento weekend went really well. We drove back yesterday along the coast. So, we took the long one and got home just before I had a few lessons online. So, that was good. We got home in time, but it was a lot more relaxing along that road, because it was a bit slower-paced, a lot less traffic, and just calmer, really nice. So, Kel sort of chilled out, kept me company, fell asleep quite a bit in the car, but it was really good. We got home and it’s funny how quickly you get sort of accustomed to driving long distances. It doesn’t really bother me anymore doing the long distance stuff. Nine hours doesn’t seem that bad. Whereas, when I was living in Melbourne, if you made me drive an hour I would have been like, “Are you serious?”.

So, anyway, yeah the trip was really good. Got back yesterday, have been working on the podcast, going through emails, working on the vlog, thinking about things. So, this week I’m going to try and bring in the the membership for the podcast website, guys. So, for anyone who wants to get access to transcripts, it’s just going to be a five-dollar monthly membership in order to get access to transcripts. And just remember, this is because I’m trying to hire someone to transcribe these episodes. So, every episode that’s about an hour long, usually, to prepare it, to transcribe it, it will take me anywhere from two to three to four hours and the person that I’ve hired it took him, the first time he was doing one, it took him six hours to transcribe one hour of text. So, that is why I am trying to bring through the… or I’m going to bring through the membership for the podcast transcripts, because I need for money to be coming in so that I can pay someone to do that for me. So, hopefully, that allows me to bring you guys more material, higher quality material, because I really think it’s important for you to have the transcripts. Obviously, the other option was to just not have transcripts, but I feel like they’re very important for you guys learning English who like to read and listen and study them for vocab. I really, really, really think transcripts are important. So, that’s why. And also, it’s going to free up my time so that I don’t have to transcribe them and I can do something else with that time like creating this kind of content.

So, that’s going to happen this week. This will be the interview episode for this week. I’ll get that out there. And then, I’m going to work on putting the membership thing together. Anything you’ve downloaded in the past, guys, is obviously going to be available for you still, you know like, as in, if you’ve downloaded it onto your computer it’s there. You can use that. But yeah, I will be requiring anyone who wants to get new episodes as well as the… access to the old ones, everything will be behind a pay wall so you need to sign up, and it’s just five dollars a month, right? So, it’s very, very, very cheap. Just consider it a donation, guys, to help me make more of these transcripts for you guys who really value these materials. .

Aside from that, I got an email about someone sort of… a listener Ali, I really appreciate the e-mail. He was sort of critiquing the podcast and giving me ideas on how to improve the quality. And so, he was effectively suggesting that the quality has diminished a little bit recently because of the uploading of vlog episodes as one thing I think he was getting at. So, I wanted to ask you guys what you thought of having the vlog episodes on the podcast, because I know that they… a lot of the time they’re visual. You need to be able to see what is going on to sort of understand what I’m talking about. So, I have noticed that they get fewer lessons… ah lessons (?!), they get fewer listens* than some of the other episodes, but I just, yeah, I wanted to put it to you guys and ask you to send me an email. So, when you get this email, this notification, that this episode is up can you reply and let me know whether or not you would like the vlog episodes to just remain on YouTube and not be added to the podcast or whether you really, really enjoy the vlog episodes on the podcast as something to listen to easily in the background even if you can’t see what’s going on. Please let me know and I will make a decision soon about whether or not to keep uploading them on to the podcast. So, yeah, your feedback’s essential. Let me know, do you like them? Don’t you like them on the podcast? And yeah if you don’t like them, if most people say they don’t, I’ll take them off.

Aside from that, announcement’s wise, yeah. He also wanted me to sort of keep reassessing how I am designing these expression episodes. He was worried that some of them weren’t as common expressions that would be used by most Australians. So, as well, if you guys don’t like hearing sort of, I guess, funnier content, stuff that Australians will know, but may not necessarily use as well, then, yeah, let me know. I think his example was the one that was like “kick the dog”, if someone farts, which I thought was, you know, a funny episode, although, you may not actually use that expression ever. But yeah, let me know what you think, guys. If you just want me to focus on English that you can use as opposed to English that you may encounter.

So, this episode’s probably gone long enough, guys. I’m about, I don’t know, 2 minutes away from the cafe. Sorry again about the background noise, but glad to have sort of gotten to chat to you guys a bit and share my thoughts with you about the podcast, where it’s going, everything like that.

And yeah, that’s probably enough for today, guys. I hope you’re having an awesome week. I hope your English is improving. I hope that you are having fun doing whatever you do wherever you are and I will chat to you soon, guys. I really appreciate your audience-ship. I really appreciate the fact that you guys listen to me. So, I’ll chat to you soon. See ya!