The Big Lap Planning Mistake Most Australian Families Make (And How to Fix It)
Most people spend weeks, if not months and years, planning their Big Lap of Australia — their route, where they want to go, what they want to see — before they’ve sorted a single little thing out that actually matters.
I’ve travelled Australia many times with my family. I’ve also helped many friends with the planning side and all that excitement of doing their Big Lap, and this is the one thing I see in common all the time: families start with the fun part (the route) and work backwards. That’s the wrong order.
If you’re planning your first Big Lap, here are the five things you need to sort out before you pick a single destination.
1. Your Time Frame: How Long Can You Actually Go?
This might seem really, really obvious, but you need to know how long you can go for. Can you go for a week? Can you go for a month? Can you go for the full year?
Honestly, if you can only manage a couple of shorter trips, and that’s a means for you to get out and about and travel — awesome, go for it. If you can take that full year off, that’s awesome too. It’s all about doing what you can, managing what you can do.
I’m talking about you, yourself. Not everybody else out there on the internet. Their life is going to be their life, so never compare your trip to someone else’s Instagram feed.
Questions to Ask Yourself
- How long can you take off work?
- Can you take long service leave?
- Can you take holiday leave at half pay?
- Can you take a chunk of time unpaid?
These are all the things that will determine what you can do and how long you can go for. And that brings us to the next thing: budget.
2. Your Budget: Work Out Your Daily Number (Not Someone Else’s)
Unfortunately, I would love to say “hey, just go out and win the lotto.” It doesn’t work that way. I haven’t had the answer to that one, and I would highly recommend going down a bit more stable option.
Your time frame is going to determine your budget. If you go for a whole year, you’re going to be spending a heap more money than if you went for a week. It’s just how it’s going to be.
Start by working out how long you can actually go for. Then you’ve got a rough idea, and it becomes a bit easier to calculate your budget.
Budget: It’s Not a Dirty Word
Some people consider “budget” a bit of a dirty word, but it is what it is, isn’t it? You can’t do anything — especially with fuel prices (don’t get me started on all of that).
A lot of families I’ve helped out with planning love saying, “Well, I want to go to Ningaloo to swim with the whale sharks, and I live in Queensland.” And you know what? That’s awesome. You’ve got to have a goal — everyone needs a goal. But can your budget allow it?
If your time frame says “great, I can travel for three months and I can fund it,” but you can’t be driving 5,000 to 6,000 kilometres over to the other side of Australia and then paying a ridiculous amount of money for an experience — what can you compromise on?
Basically, we’re building on the constraints of how you’re going to plan this Big Lap.
Calculate Your Daily Budget Number
You need to work out a daily number, and this is your number — not mine, not the family you follow on Instagram. Your family is going to be different to our family and everybody else’s family.
I do have a budget calculator that can help you work this out, but basically what you need to do is work out:
- How far can you travel per day? We as a family travel slow — a couple hundred kilometres every couple of days, if that. So our fuel bill is tiny in comparison to other people. Yes, fuel prices have gone up, but we don’t travel as far.
- What’s more important: one amazing activity, or spreading your budget over time? There’s no right or wrong answer here. Sit down and have a good think about that one.
- What are your major cost categories? Fuel, accommodation (caravan parks can get ridiculously expensive), and food (especially in the middle of nowhere, and especially if you have a couple of picky eaters in your family).
Some families budget for about $50 a day. I think that’s probably a bit on the low side. It’s always better to overestimate, then there are no surprises.
Start with a rough number, and then you know roughly what you need to calculate for.
3. Life Admin: The Boring Stuff You Can’t Skip
This one is boring. There’s no sneaky way about it. Life admin — who really wants to do that, seriously? But you need to get this sorted.
My suggestion is to get this sorted months before your departure date. Even if it’s just a list of stuff that you and your partner can start working through, jot it all down. When you start doing that, you’ll realise there is lots of stuff to organise when it comes to the life admin side of things.
Life Admin Checklist
- Your house: Do you rent it out? Do you sell it? Do you lock it up?
- School (if you’ve got kids): Do you start homeschooling? Do you get a school exemption?
- Medical stuff: If you need any medication, be aware that some medications can’t be filled interstate. I live in South Australia, and if you go over to Victoria or Western Australia, some chemists won’t fill the script — it’s really bizarre. If you do have any medications or medical needs, have a chat with your doctor well in advance so you can work out a plan.
Get it all down on paper so you can visually see what you need to sort out before you leave.
4. Van and Setup: What Do You Actually Need?
Once you’ve sorted out all the boring stuff — or at least jotted it all down — start having a think about your van and setup.
This is your personal opinion. You do not have to have the Instagram-perfect, gazillion-dollar Taj Mahal towed by your 12-cylinder something-or-other.
What I’m trying to get at is: what comfort level do you want for your family?
If it’s just me and Tim going around Australia, I’d be happy in a rooftop tent. That’s my comfort level. It doesn’t take much, and I’d be happy there because that would mean we could get off all the beaten tracks and really go and explore.
With kids, however, we’ve gone with a caravan. For us personally, and the kids’ needs for our family in particular, we need that safe spot for them, which is the caravan.
On-Road vs Off-Road: What Do You Need?
One thing to consider is: do you need an off-road van or an on-road van? (I’ll probably get Tim to do a separate video on that one because he’ll go into it in a lot more detail. Do subscribe so you don’t miss it.)
If you don’t have a van already, that’s cool. Just do a little bit of research and factor in whether you’re going to finance it or buy it outright. Some families we know sell their house to purchase a van and car, with the idea of selling it later and buying another house down the track.
There’s no right or wrong. There are pros and cons with everything. Just be aware of it, and do your research.
Don’t Spend Outside Your Means
Think about where you want to go. Do you want to go caravan park to caravan park? If so, you probably need an on-road caravan, which will keep the van cost down. However, your caravan park fees and accommodation costs will increase.
Don’t spend outside your means. If it means you’ve got an awesome caravan but no money spare to actually enjoy it, just do your homework and weigh up what it is that you need.
5. Your Route: This Comes LAST (Not First)
The next one is interestingly the one most people actually start with — and this is why I say you need to sort out all the other things first.
Number five: your route. Where are you going to go?
Your time frame is going to determine that route. Your budget is going to determine that route. Your life admin — like, if you don’t want to sell your house or rent it out, you may not want to leave it unattended for a long period of time. Your van setup — if you’ve got the perfect 1980s Jayco and it’s roadworthy, I’d be taking that over getting something new. But I probably wouldn’t be taking it on heavily corrugated roads in the middle of nowhere.
All of these constraints will determine your route.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen it so many times: people start with “Well, I’m going to see this and this and this,” and then they try to fit everything else around it. That’s all well and good, but if you don’t have the budget for it, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.
Route Planning: The Fun Part
This is actually the most fun part. Once you’ve got your constraints — how long you’re going to go for, what your budget is, what your van can handle — then you can work out your route.
Is it possible to do a lap of Australia in three months?
Yes, it’s absolutely possible. But if you work out how many kilometres it is around Australia (it’s a lot), and you divide that by how many days in three months, that lets you know how many kilometres per day you have to travel. It’s a huge amount, which doesn’t give you much time to do the actual exploration.
If you want to do it because you want to tick off that box, awesome — go for it. But just be realistic.
Our Approach: Travel Sections at a Time
Australia’s massive. Australia’s huge. My suggestion would be to see parts of it instead of just going all out and seeing all of it in one hit — where, realistically, you’re probably not going to see any of it properly.
So, coming back to the route: how much time have you got? What’s your budget? Do you want to be travelling big kilometres per day and adding up that fuel bill? Maybe you’ve got people in your family (like we do) who don’t like the car, so you can’t spend ages in the car. That’s going to determine how far you go.
For example:
The last big trip we did, we went for 11 months. We went from Adelaide down to the Margaret River area in Western Australia, then up to around Exmouth, and then back. That took us around 11 months.
Our next trip we’re thinking about is probably the Victoria High Country. We’ll probably do about six months going from Adelaide to Victoria and around there.
We prefer to travel and see sections at a time, and then mush it all together to go, “Yes, we’ve seen a heap of Australia.” That’s us, but I’m just showing examples. There’s no right or wrong answer.
Your Bucket List Experiences
What you can do, though, is have your bucket list experiences. If there’s something you really, really want to see, weigh it up. Can you do it in this particular trip? Do you need to plan a subsequent trip? Just see how you go and see where you fit.
Recap: The 5 Things to Sort Before You Plan Your Route
So there you have it. Here are the five things you need to sort out before you can walk out the door and leave everything behind:
- Time frame — How long can you actually go for?
- Budget — Work out your daily number (not someone else’s)
- Life admin — House, school, medical — get it all on a list
- Van and setup — What do you actually need (not what Instagram says you need)
- Your route — This comes last, once you know your constraints
Budget is the one families get stuck on longest. Our Budget Calculator & Planner runs the numbers the same way we do for our own trips and gives you a daily figure to plan around.
Once you’ve sorted these five, there’s still the practical side of actually getting ready to leave, we’ve covered that separately in 6 Things You Need to Sort Before You Leave on Your Big Lap. And if you want to hear what we’d do differently now, that’s in 10 Things We Wish We’d Known Before Our ‘Big Lap’ around Australia.
Join the Plan. Save. Travel Community
I’m going to do a separate video on all of these topics, so make sure you subscribe so you can see them when I release them.
You’re also welcome to come and join our Plan. Save. Travel Skool community, which is free. I’ve got a seven-day challenge that goes into all of this pre-planning stuff in a lot more detail, and I have checklists so you don’t have to think about it at all.
I want to try and make this as easy as possible, because visiting Australia and exploring is absolutely amazing. And if you can do it and leave home not stressed — that’s the easiest, and it’s just so rewarding.
I hope you got some good information out of this one. I’ll put in-depth details on all of these topics in future posts because they’re all topics we can talk about for ages. But you’ve got a bit of an overview now. You’ve got a starting point.
I’ll see you in the Skool community if you’d like to join us there, and I’ll see you in the next video.
