Solo travel is a journey of the soul as much as it is of the body. Maybe even more. When you travel alone, you don’t have the leverage to center your experience around someone else. Someone’s comfort. Someone’s expectations. Someone’s goals. Or someone else’s ego. It’s 100% about you. Which can be frightening but at the same time addictive.
Why Solo Travel?
When I first started solo traveling, I had no idea what I was doing. I had been married for 15 years. I was a single dad of three kids. We had a week-on/week-off parenting time schedule, which wasn’t so great for seeing my kids but it lent itself to the opportunities for new experiences. In my 40s, I soon discovered that my friends who were married with kids had almost no free time. My friends who were married and didn’t have kids were usually tearing out a wall or building a deck or our schedules just didn’t line up. When I had my kids, they had free time and when I didn’t they were usually working or not making any plans.
If I didn’t decide to just go out and do things on my own, I was never going to get to do anything. My excuses to get out were gone. I had nobody to base my plans around. My only real limitation was money and being able to fit whatever I was doing around my work schedule.
Getting Over the Fear of Solo Travel
If you haven’t done it, traveling by yourself can be an intimidating experience. Not just from the sheer weight of being responsible for all the planning, paying, and itinerary, but also another feeling you don’t expect: feeling stupid. We’ve had it ingrained in us for so long that something is only worth doing if we can share the experience with another person. We have to have a partner in crime. We have to find our soulmate or other half or twin flame or blah blah blah. We need someone else with us to bear witness.
The flat, simple, and honest truth is that is a bunch of crap. Making our experiences valid only if someone else approves of them is just as unhealthy as personal validation based on partner approval. In other words, the places we choose to be shouldn’t mean something just because someone else said they were cool.
One trick to keep in mind about this is to hold your cards close to your chest when making plans. Because everybody has an opinion, and they will share them with you. One reaction I got constantly about making plans to go places and have new experiences was “Why would you want to go there?” Talk about letting the air out of someone’s tires. Especially if they are just starting out and feeling insecure about soaking that much planning and anxiety into a singular experience.
After all, unless they are coming with you, who cares what they think?
My suggestion is to keep your plans to yourself. Let them find out where you are going once you get home and plaster everything all over social media.
Starting off Small with Solo Travel
You don’t need to hop on a plane and go to Thailand for two weeks for your first trip. You don’t need to rent a car and drive all over Ireland. You don’t need to get a rail pass and explore Europe by train for your first trip. Start off small. Believe me when I tell you that solo travel is a muscle you need to build up before being able to bench your body weight. Otherwise you are going to mess something up and never want to do it again.
Take yourself out to dinner and a movie one night. These are practical skills to have in your toolbox, because when you are out in the wilds, you are going to be doing this a lot. Solo traveling in London might take you to the Globe Theatre for a performance of As You Like It, standing in the cheap seats with the other groundlings. If you can’t sit through an hour and a half of a Fast and Furious movie just because you are alone, you’re going to have a bad time.
Dinner is a good place to start. So many people have a stigma of eating alone. Who is looking at you? With other people think you are pathetic? Sad? Lonely? A couple nights out at a Mexican Restaurant will help ease the transition to solo travel. Eat the chips and salsa. Have a margarita. Get the smothered burrito or try the Molcajete. Work your way up to a plate of sizzling fajitas that everyone turns to stare at as they carry it to your table. A table of one.
Solo Travel as a Journey of the Soul
When you travel alone, you do so with intention. There’s a scene in the movie The Razor’s Edge where a man washing dishes on the river says to Bill Murray, “Work without intention is not work at all. It’s an empty motion.” What is my intention on this journey? That is personal. It should be personal with anyone who tries it. Holy.
I don’t set out thinking something will look good on Instagram or TikTok. I capture some of the moments I put on social media as part of the work. Every new place I go or person I talk to gives me a tiny piece of the puzzle. Like a mosaic, these pieces all come together somehow to create an image of something I have never seen before. Maybe it’s a reflection of myself or the world. I don’t know.
Maybe one day I’ll have enough pieces lined up to get some idea. It could take several lifetimes. I’ve only got the one that I know of. I don’t know if I get to come back or if the pieces I’ve collected get passed on to others I’m sharing these experiences with to add to their mosaic. Mingle with other travelers in a group tour and make friendships that don’t have to go past the moment, or choose to stay in contact with these new people for a lifetime. The choice is yours!
What I do know is every day challenges my spirit in some new way. From seeing a beautiful vista of desert mountains or a rainforest in Oregon to pushing my limits with bad roads and worse directions, I know it’s just going to be me and how I respond to a situation. Respond, rather than react. Sometimes you do react.
There Will Be Bad Days on Your Trip
I’ve had my share of bad days on the road. Making mistakes. Blowing past a turn because of a lag in the navigation system, hitting a pothole wrong and feeling that tipping point in my rig where I wince and wait for the sound of everything winding up on the floor. Getting ripped off by a gym because I was desperate enough to pay $20 for a day use pass to take a shower.
I’ve had days where I could scream myself hoarse. When I am mad at my dog for needing to stop to pee. When I have watched myself react instead of responding. I’ve done it on the roads of the Southwest, I’ve done it in Ireland on foggy hilltops, I’ve done it in pine forests of the Rocky Mountains. Cities, plains, mountains, and seasides. Each time I break feels like a failure. But I always get up, dust myself off and try again.
You are going to have bad days. Once you accept that, it gets easier.
The Loneliness of Solo Travel
Does it get lonely? Don’t you wish you had someone else to enjoy that sunset with? Someone to point out that shooting star to as you look up at the night sky? A hand to hold as you stand in the spray of a waterfall? Whether it’s a travel companion or a romantic partner, we are social creatures. We do pretty well in groups. We can split resources or skillsets and work as a team to make better decisions.
But we also lose spontaneity. We find ourselves living to appease someone else. To be strong for someone else. To be vulnerable for someone else. We find ourselves shouldering the brunt of decision making and having to pay dividends when our choices don’t align with their expectations.
How do you overcome loneliness on the open road? It’s just part of solo travel. Sometimes you feel it worse than other times. Or you let other people in for those brief moments, those windows of opportunity to make connections, no matter how long they may last. I’ve met some incredible people. I’ve had deeper conversations in my travels with people whose names I never learned than I have had with others I’ve known my whole life.
You are only really lonely if you close yourself off from connection. Most of the time that connection is with whoever it is in your own head you spend your waking moments trying to ignore.
Solo Travel has its Perks
You can pick anywhere you want to go without that comment of “Why would you want to go there?” You can travel light. You don’t have to check luggage unless you want. You can move at your own pace. You can skip things that don’t interest you or you can linger in places you never knew would be so fascinating. You don’t hear complaints of how something is boring or scary or weird. Unless it’s you.
You get to choose the playlist. You get to make mistakes and know the only person it is inconveniencing is you. And if it comes up again, it’s because it was a lesson, not because someone is using it against you. When you travel solo, you are working towards maintaining a balance. Finding peace at the same time as seeking adventure. It’s about getting out of your comfort zone, understanding your boundaries, and seeing cool shit in the process.
Get Started Today
There’s no better time to start a long journey than right now. Even if that journey begins with a plan. Check out Trip Advisor for destinations, hotels, and other accommodations to get you pointed in the right direction. Rent a car and get a close up view of a place like the locals. Get that rail pass and a whole other perspective as you watch the ever changing landscape.
You are going to need gear too. I’ve been using Osprey backpacks for long term solo travel as well as dayhiking, camping, and just getting out and going. One of the best things you can do for yourself as a solo traveler is taking care of your feet. You won’t get far without them. Check out Fox River for some quality socks to wear on your next solo adventure.
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As a solo female I get asked all the time, “but aren’t you lonely?”. No. I’m not. Ever. First off, I share my tiny-home-on-wheels with a dog and cat. Secondly, it’s exactly as you said when you said, “You are only really lonely if you close yourself off from connection.” 100% accurate. Third, and not to sound egotistical but I love my own company. I am not only happy but more importantly I am content. I know myself better now and I LIKE myself better now.
Thanks for writing this….I was going to write about this topic as well (and I still might do, but from a female perspective).
Well said! Thank you for reading!