Not all Highway Wanderers are nomads. Some of us live on the road full time and some have a fixed place of abode to which they return from time to time.
If you still have a home, you need to feel comfortable that it's safe.
You might be lucky to have neighbours who will look after your property as if it were their own or you might have children living nearby who will look in regularly to check that everything is OK.
If you don't have either of these and your property needs regular attention like feeding animals, mowing lawns and so on, you might want to use house-sitters.
There are motorhomers who are happy to spend some time, weeks or months, looking after other peoples property in return for somewhere to park their motorhome. You might meet such people on the road or you might get in touch with them through the Highway Wanderers Newsletter or the Wanderer, either by reading their advertisements or by putting your own ad in. For more information on motorhome exchanges, get in touch with the appropriate support person listed in the Advice section of this site.
If you are nomads and live on the road all the time, there are some things you need to do differently. Things others can put off till they get home, you have to do somehow.
You need an address for your drivers licence, vehicle rego, pension and so on. This need not be a residential address but the bureaucracy will consider you a non-person if you don't have a mailing address. Your insurance company, if it isn't motorhome friendly, might demand a garage address. If you have children you can use their address. If you don't, you might have a lifelong friend who will let you use theirs. If all else fails, I guess you can use your solicitor or your accountant to provide one. Some of us use the address of our mail forwarding service.
The Electoral Commission needs to know you exist. You can register as an itinerant elector. This means you do not have an address registered with the Electoral Commission and they will not write to you for any reason. You will be able to vote by absentee or postal vote but you can't choose any electorate, they will continue to list you in the last electorate in which you were registered. Since they can't get in touch with you, they will take you off the roll if you fail to vote.
One day you might want to settle down. You can keep your furniture and other things in storage. If you have to pay for this it may be outside your budget. Alternatively you can sell everything and buy new when you buy a place to live. You can, of course, do a bit of both.
All Highway wanderers have some problems in common and most of these are common to all motorhomers.
If your children travel with you, they have problems of their own which you must address.
Clearly the most important is education. Distance education can be the school of the air but most people use correspondence school.
This can be hard for the children, especially as they get into high school but it has been said that two hours a day of one on one schooling from a competent parent is the equivalent of six hours a day in a class of twenty or thirty pupils.
For more information on distance education, get in touch with the appropriate support person listed in the Advice section of this site.
Children generally need more entertainment than their parents and of a different kind. Most children will only take a certain amount of museums and the like. Books, computer games and videos will provide for some of their needs but they will probably want to spend some time at an amusement park, at the cinema, playing sport or just playing the pinnies.
The children will probably need to get away from you from time to time more than you will need to get away from them.
Friends of their own age will be hard to maintain. For some children this isn't a problem but for some it will be very hard. If they are lucky they will have friends they can keep in touch with by letter or email.
There is an up-side for them in travelling the country. They get may much more training in self-reliance than their peers, they get to meet lots of people, and they have lots of unique experiences to carry with them into later life.
You need reliable, long term mail forwarding system.
All post offices will hold mail for a month if it is addressed to
You
Poste Restante
Somewhere Post Office
Postcode
This is no less reliable than any other mail but mistakes do happen.
If you have relations or friends who will pick up your mail and send it to you whenever you give them a forwarding address, you have the problems solved.
If you don't, there are organisations like Landbase Australia which will, for a fee, forward any mail for you addressed to their PO Box.
For day-to-day shopping and cash, EFTPOS with cash out is available in virtually every town.
ATMs are virtually universal and available 24 hours a day.
There are times when you want to deal with your bank personally. Most banks have branches all round Australia at which you can manage you accounts. Credit Unions are generally more restricted in their geography. Some people keep Credit Union accounts in each state they travel in.
You are supposed to register you vehicle and your driver licence in the state in which you reside (i.e where your official address is - I use my mail forwarding service address). Some people choose which state to call their home state to get the benefit of lower costs or easier renewal.
While some renewals can be done by mail, eventually you may have to return to your home state to deal with safety inspections and licence photographs. The CMCA is embarking on a project to get the systems of roadworthiness certification made easier for interstate travellers.
A summary of the various state requirements was published in the July 2000 issue of the Wanderer.
Most of us have to live within a budget of some kind. Life on the road has some traps for those with low budgets. It is wise to take care of the five effs.
Fuel is generally a significant slice of the weekly expenditure. One way to keep this down is to travel slowly. Keeping an eye out for the best discount price can help. Avoiding states where the excise is high can be useful but not everyone wants to stay in Queensland all the time ;-)
Fees for caravan parks can be a major component of your budget if you stay in them every night. There are places to overnight free if you don't need to plug in to power. They are not easy to find but some states Main Roads Departments produce maps which show some. Talking to other travellers who use them is a good way to develop you own list of suitable places. Most towns have taps in parks or in rest areas at which you can replenish your fresh water supply. Disposing of waste water can be a problem. Some towns have dump stations and if all else fails you can go into a caravan park with a dump station every few days to dump black water and to do the laundry. The Caravan World Year Book lists most caravan parks and shows their facilities including dump stations.
Food is obviously going to be an important part of the budget. Not eating out too often is clearly a good move. Buying fruit and veges at roadside stalls, particularly the smaller ones, is usually a way of saving money.
Fun can cost a lot if you go to every tourist attraction in sight or if you visit the pokies at every RSL. There are lots of cheap things to do and campfires with fellow travellers are free and very enjoyable.
Failure of you vehicle can be expensive. Keeping on top of your routine maintenance and responding early to signs of impending trouble can save heaps.
Being ill on the road is something to be avoided. Happily your lifestyle will minimise the chance. If you do get ill, there are adequate medical services in most towns and should you need it there is the Royal Flying Doctor Service to provide care in the outback. If you suffer from some life threatening illness or accident, the Air Ambulance service can move you to a place where specialist care is available. It is important to have ambulance cover either by subscription of in your private medical insurance. The cost of long distance ambulance recovery can be extremely high.
Finding the local TV stations can be a problem. A good antenna is a must and having your TV or VCR preset to every Australian channel makes tuning easy. There is a book called TV Across Australia: The Caravanners Guide to Television Reception which lists every station in Australia giving channel number, location and expected range as well as some useful tips.
You can equip yourself with a satellite dish and receiver which give access to most of the free-to-air services and to many radio services wherever you are. The equipment is pretty expensive but you do get full coverage (except in the wet season in the top end)
On the road telephone service is by cellphone. The original digital service (GSM) works well in populated areas while CDMA has wider coverage and is generally better for travellers. CDMA will be phased out in 2008 and replaced with a system called NextG. This is supposed to have the same coverage as CDMA but some have complained that this is not so. My experience with NextG has been pretty good. I use it for both telephone and for internet connection.
Satellite phones are expensive both to buy and to use but they do provide the ultimate coverage, everywhere in Australia.
If you have HF radio, you can use Radphone to connect into the telephone network. This will only work as well as the radio link permits but, on a good day, you can connect from anywhere. For more information, get in touch with the HF Radio Network; the contact details are listed in the Wanderer under "Special Interest Groups".
If you need Internet access there are several options.
Internet cafes can now be found in many towns. For a fee, you can surf the Net and recover your email. The disadvantages of this method is that you have to compose you replies online and don't get to keep your email in your own computer.
If you have a laptop computer equipped with a modem, a reliable but complicated method is to borrow someone's telephone or fax line. You will need a modem cable with the two types of connector which are in use, RJ12 is the little square clear plastic connector found on modern telephones and Telecom 605 is the older large square yellow connector which plug into a similar wall socket. You can buy an adapter from RJ12 to Telecom 605 which, together with a cable with RJ12 connector, gives you everything you need. Having a Telstra telecard (or the Optus equivalent) allows you to charge the calls to your own domestic telephone account which obviates the need to find out how much the call cost and then paying for it. You will also be better served if your ISP has POPs (points of presence) all round Australia. Telstra Big Pond, Optusnet and the bigger ISPs all have many places you can dial into making the calls local or short distance STD. If you compose your outgoing emails offline and you don't get hundreds of incoming emails every day, it will only take a couple of minutes to check and send your mail. If you use a website to keep your family posted about your travels, uploading the new files will take a few minutes more.
It is possible to use your mobile telephone for connecting to the net. Several brands now offer Data Suites as optional extras for their mobile phones. You need to make sure that the computer, the phone , the data suite and your ISP service are all compatible. Obviously the call cost is higher using a mobile phone but, with care, the cost can be contained within reasonable limits. Competition in the mobile phone market has given rise to new opportunities to negotiate good deals.
Telstra provide a data service called Mobile Internet which can be accessed from wherever you can get signal on your cellphone. It provides full web access and the only charge is the call cost which is at the WAP rate (presently 33 cents/minute - 16.5cents/minute off peak) which gets expensive if you surf for hours!. Email can be accessed on the web but direct access to your own ISP may be limited. You will need a data suite to connect the phone to the computer.
Recently Telstra introduced a new product called Minimax. This is digital wireless modem which connects to the computer via a USB port, so the computer must be relatively up to date, and connects to the internet via the CDMA cellphone system. In the city it works at broadband speed and in the country it connects to a system called 1X at a speed about twice as fast as a 56kbps fixed line modem. With this device, a traveller equipped with a suitable computer can stay in touch whenever they are in good CDMA telephone coverage. There are various charging plans ranging from a casual user rate which is appropriate for low volume use such as emails to expensive monthly plans which provide lots of connection time or data volume useful for music, video and software downloads and lots of web surfing.
With the closure of the CDMA service, the Telstra Next G service will be an adequate replacement. In fact it work much faster than CDMA did, sometimes achieving over 10MBytes/sec though this is not always possible. The wireless modem must be replaced to change from CDMA to NextG but this can be done at minimal cost. The NextG coverage is about the same as CDMA and there are still some shadow areas where contact is poor or entirely absent. An in car kit with an external antenna is well worth the cost if you need to have regular internet connections.
There is some advertising that suggests that other suppliers will be implementing an equivalent service but one must be careful to check coverage before committing to one of these.
There is a data service as an extra option with satellite TV. It provides a high speed down link so your can surf the web painlessly. You do need a separate uplink which would normally be a mobile phone connection with all the attendant costs.
There are now many places where laptops which are equipped with Wi-Fi can access the internet using "wireless hot spots". This technology is now standardised so all systems can use the hot spots. Hot spots are distributed around most cities and some are free while others charge. They have a limited range (about 50m). Telstra has installed hot spots in many places including lots of MacDonalds restaurants. The Telstra website lists all of their hot spots. It is a challenge to find things on the Telstra website but if you log into "www.telstramobility.com" it is a bit easier. Telstra charges for their use but you can, I believe, use a mobile phone account to pay. Wi_Fi is built into most lap-tops now. Your computer help files should tell you how to activate Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi is called Airport on Macintosh computers).
All of this assumes that you are knowledgeable about all of these things but you probably wont be reading this unless you are. If you need help, talk to someone who has mastered the art or get in touch with the appropriate support person listed in the Advice section of this site. Generally the help available at mobile phone dealers is very basic even at real Telstra shops.
How much stuff, clothes, crockery, cooking utensils, food and so on, do you need to take in your motorhome.
Much less than you first thought. You need to take everything you will use but nothing unnecessary. Most people have to empty some stuff out after a few months on the road.
One of the delights of life on the road is that you can visit old friends whenever you journey takes you to their district. Another delight is making new friends wherever you go. As long as you don't stay inside you motorhome all the time, you will meet wonderful people who share your interest in travelling round Australia.