E need the pink stuff," said a hoarse voice from the other side of the screen door.

From inside the cabin, I could see the tops of two little heads, one with a ponytail and both with desperate dark eyes. "Please," whispered Clementine, my 4-year-old.

"Show me your bug bites," I said suspiciously. Obediently, Clementine and her friend Alison held out their arms. Two tiny red bumps.

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"O.K., but don't go crazy with it," I said, handing them the calamine lotion through a crack in the door.

"I won't," Clementine promised. An hour later, they were spotted down by the main lodge, two chalky-pink waifs who looked as if they had fallen into a mixing vat while touring a Pepto-Bismol factory. I found an empty lotion bottle floating in the lake, abandoned near the paddle boats.

In our family, calamine lotion is a controlled substance. Certain people can't control themselves. Once I found "C-L-e-M" written on a wall in pink, like a scene from "The Shining." Ever since the infamous Polka-Dot Fur incident, in which Clem menaced the cat with a soggy cotton swab, I have been forced to crack down.

Last week, if I guarded all my drugstore supplies — from rubbing alcohol to prescription drugs — more closely than usual while we were on vacation in the Adirondacks, it was for good reason. We were about to embark on a cross-country move (all our household possessions, including the back-up cotton swabs, had already been loaded into a truck that was at that moment hurtling through Ohio) and I was in no mood to run out of anything I had deemed important enough to earn a spot in my precious carry-on cache.

If pressed, I would admit that it wouldn't have been a big deal to replace items like calamine lotion at any old brick-and-mortar drugstore after I got to my new town. But transferring the refills on prescription drugs might be another story. That task loomed as one of the zillions of tedious move-related chores that had me tossing and turning in bed at 2 a.m.

So before going on vacation, I decided to test three online pharmacies — at Walgreens.com, CVS.com and Drugstore.com — to see if they would remove the stress from the process. All three Internet sites offered a range of services; they all accept insurance and charge the customer the appropriate co-payment. All three will send, through the mail, new prescriptions and refills. And at
Walgreens.com and CVS.com, customers may also choose to pick up prescriptions ordered online at any of the companies' stores.

My original plan might have seemed simple to a person not in a highly sensitive pre-move state of paranoia: I wanted to transfer two prescriptions (each had two refills left) from my local drugstore and have the medications mailed to me in California. But I feared the transfer process; since the Internet drugstores would have to call my own pharmacy directly, I feared glitches. (After weeks of such tedious chores as canceling utilities, then canceling the cancel orders after a move delay, then canceling again on a later date, even something as simple as a phone call to a drugstore seemed fraught with potential pitfalls.)

But I was getting ahead of myself. At two online sites I never even got as far as the transfer process. At Drugstore.com, for instance, one of the first steps I could take was to find out whether I could use my insurance to pay for drugs. I clicked on a list of insurance plans the site accepts. (The site accepts only a limited number of plans; the list of about 20 included carriers that ranged from Anthem Prescription Management to various Blue Cross plans to WellPoint Pharmacy Management.) It turned out that my carrier, United Health Care, was listed among the 10 plans the site does not accept.

At my next stop, CVS.com, I had a harder time ascertaining whether the site would accept my insurance. Unable to find a list of accepted plans, I phoned the site's toll-free customer service number. A representative told me that CVS.com had no central list. When I asked if the plans honored online were identical to those accepted at the more than 4,000 CVS stores nationwide, she said the two lists might be different. But she said that if I placed an order online, CVS.com would notify me if my insurance was unacceptable.

"And how much would I be charged in that case?" I asked. "I'm nearly finished with the checkout process, but the site hasn't told me how much my arthritis pain relievers would cost without insurance."

"What's the milligram amount on that one?" she asked. I told her. She looked it up. "That would be $131.99 for 30 pills."

"You'll notify me before charging me?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

But that seemed like too much money to fool around with. So I called Todd Andrews, a CVS spokesman, for guidance. "The best way to check is to check with your own insurer," Mr. Andrews said. "Insurance plans frequently change their rules, from year to year, or even from six months to six months."

But when I phoned United Health Care, I hit another dead end. A customer service representative named Chad told me the insurer had no way to check whether the insurance was honored by a particular online pharmacy. He said he could only look up bricks-and-mortar stores.

I had better luck at Walgreens
.com. The database on the site, which is owned by the Walgreen Company, is completely integrated with the database used by the 3,818 stores the company owns in 43 states. Although no central list of insurers appears online, a company spokesman, Michael Polzin, told me the online site accepts the same insurance as the brick-and-mortar stores.

"That way, there's no confusion," he said. "Also, as soon as you order or update information, either online or at one of the retail stores, it's updated everywhere throughout the system. So if an online customer goes into any of our retail stores, the store would have their prescription history."

So I placed Walgreens.com pharmacy order No. 4444657. Shipping, by standard mail, cost $1.95. My only regret was not ordering a spare case of calamine lotion as well.