Mail, meds and mobile signal: the logistics of long-term travel with kids

Nine years ago I still had a landline number saved in my head. Now I couldn't tell you the last time I used one, but I can tell you exactly which pharmacy in Alice Springs has my daughter's asthma script on file, because I had to ring them from a servo at Ti Tree to sort it out. That's the bit nobody warns you about when you sell up and hit the road. The driving is the easy part. Keeping the paperwork of a normal life running while you're 2,000 kilometres from your old postcode is the actual skill.

This isn't a packing list. It's the boring admin scaffolding that either holds your trip together or quietly falls apart around month four, usually right when you're furthest from anywhere useful.

Mail redirection: the system, not the app

Australia Post's redirection service will forward your mail to any address for a set period, and most long-term travellers renew it every twelve months rather than treat it as a one-off. The problem isn't the service, it's picking an address that can actually receive parcels reliably for years, not just letters for a few months.

We use a family member's place as the redirection point, then have them scan anything that looks official — rego renewals, insurance notices, anything from the ATO — and send us a photo. Genuinely urgent stuff, like an actual cheque or a card renewal, we get them to forward to whichever post office we're going to be near in ten days. Poste restante still works at most post offices; you just need to know your own itinerary well enough in advance to nominate one, which loops back to something I bang on about constantly: a Big Lap without at least a rough two-week horizon is asking for missed everything.

If you're still working out how loose or fixed that itinerary should be, it's worth reading our piece on pulling kids out of school for the Big Lap — the same tension between flexibility and structure applies to your admin, not just your route.

Scripts and specialists: the appointment you can't skip

Before we left in 2017 I assumed medication would be the easy part. Wrong. PBS scripts are only valid for a set period and most have a limited number of repeats, and once you're out of your home state, continuity of care becomes the actual challenge, not availability of the drug itself.

Our fix, and I'd call this close to mandatory for anyone travelling long-term with kids on regular medication: get a GP before you leave to write scripts with the maximum allowable repeats and, where the condition allows it, ask about an eScript. The eScript token means any pharmacy in the country can dispense against it without you needing a physical paper copy that's sitting in a drawer back home. My wife manages our daughter's asthma plan this way now — the pharmacist in whatever town we're in pulls up the token, checks it against the My Health Record, done. No dramas, no interstate faxing, which is genuinely how it used to work not that long ago.

For anything needing an actual specialist review — an orthodontist check, a paediatrician follow-up — we book those around trips home or plan them into a leg of the lap that passes through a regional centre big enough to have one. Alice Springs, Broome, Mount Isa, Broken Hill: all have decent medical infrastructure if you're not fussy about which doctor you see. Remote doesn't mean cut off, but it does mean you plan the appointment three months out, not three days out.

Mobile signal and the myth of "always connected"

Telstra's coverage maps look generous until you're actually standing under one of the "coverage" claims on the Tanami and getting nothing. The honest rule I've settled on after towing this van into most corners of the country: Telstra is still the widest net for regional and remote Australia, full stop, but "coverage" on their map often means a roadside repeater good for a text message, not a video call with your kid's school. Optus and Vodafone are fine on the coastal run and inland highways but drop out fast once you're off the blacktop. If you're working remotely — and increasingly plenty of us are — a dual-SIM setup with Telstra as primary and a Starlink unit as backup has become close to standard kit for anyone doing the Gibb, the Savannah Way or the Cape. It's not cheap, but neither is missing a work deadline from a dead zone.

We run Starlink's roam plan for exactly the trips where we know Telstra will thin out — the Gibb River Road and anything through the Kimberley back roads falls into that category. For the east coast run where towns are closer together, we don't bother; the phone network handles it fine.

Working remotely without pretending you're in an office

I still do a chunk of the writing for this site from wherever the van's parked, and the single biggest lesson after years of it: your connectivity plan needs to match your actual work, not an aspirational version of it. If you need reliable video calls, you're building your route around towns and caravan parks with confirmed NBN or good mobile backhaul, not chasing the prettiest free camp and hoping for the best. Kellie's covered the on-the-ground version of this well in our piece on working remotely on the road, and I'd say her take lines up with mine: block out your non-negotiable work windows first, then plan the scenery around them, not the other way round.

Banking, bills and the accounts nobody thinks about

Direct debit everything you can before you leave — rego, insurance, any subscription that has a hard due date. It sounds obvious, but I've met more than one nomad who got their van repossessed... no, that's not quite fair, but I have met people whose insurance lapsed because a renewal notice sat in a mailbox for six weeks. Set every recurring payment to autopay from an account you top up remotely, and keep a second card from a different bank as backup. Bank apps occasionally lock you out for "unusual location activity" when you're withdrawing cash in three states in a fortnight, and having a second card from a different institution has saved us more than once.

School enrolment and Medicare — the two systems that don't like nomads

Distance education enrolment varies by state, and if you're doing it properly rather than just "unschooling" informally, you need to lock in your enrolling state before you leave and understand that switching mid-year gets messy fast. Medicare is more forgiving; your card works nationally regardless of which state issued it, but bulk-billing rates and GP availability vary wildly by region; some outback towns have none at all and rely on the Royal Flying Doctor Service or a visiting GP roster.

Worth checking the Department of Health's own guidance on rural health access before you go, because it changes what "remote" actually means for your medical planning — a town three hours from a hospital is a very different proposition to one three hours from a GP.

The system that actually holds it together

None of this is complicated individually. Mail redirection, eScripts, a dual-SIM plan, autopay — they're all things you'd set up for a six-month posting overseas without blinking. The trick with the Big Lap is that it's not six months, it's often two or three years, and things you set up once quietly expire: redirection lapses, a script runs out of repeats, a card expires and the new one goes to an address you don't check anymore. We do a proper admin review every six months now, usually timed to a longer stopover — a week at a place like Discovery Parks Alice Springs works well for this, decent connectivity, close to services, long enough to actually sit down and sort it. Check what's about to expire, re-up anything close, ring the pharmacy, ring the insurer. It's not exciting admin. But it's the difference between a lap that runs smoothly and one where you're standing at a servo in Ti Tree trying to sort a script with one bar of signal.

— Marto Kelleher, Founder & Touring Editor