Book the Damn Trip

On solo travel, identity reclamation, and why going alone is the bravest thing you will ever do

The first night I spent completely alone in a foreign city, I sat at a small table by a window and ordered dinner for one.

No one to negotiate with about the restaurant. No one to consult about the wine. No one to manage, entertain, check in with, or perform for. Just me, a menu in a language I barely spoke, and a glass of something local that tasted like the version of myself I had been trying to get back to for years.

I hadn't realized, until that moment, how long I had been performing myself for other people. How even my preferences, where to eat, when to walk, what to notice, had been unconsciously filtered through what would work for everyone else. In that restaurant, alone, I didn't have to perform anything. I could just be.

It felt like meeting someone I used to know.

The Trip That First Taught Me

The first time I traveled alone, I was 25. A relationship had ended and rocked my world, and somehow I knew the answer wasn't to stay still. It was to move. I took three months and learned something I'd carry forever: the power of going somewhere alone.

It started in San Miguel, where I went to learn Spanish. Then a flight to Antwerp, which became my base camp for weeks. From there I wandered: Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona with a friend, Brussels, Luxembourg, sleeping on the couches of friends-of-friends who helped me navigate Belgium like a local. Cities blurred together in the best way.

I remember sitting in a Paris café, knowing no French, and feeling completely at peace. This was long before iPhones. There was no scrolling, no mapping, no noise. Just watching. Listening to conversations I couldn't understand. Wandering toward whatever looked interesting. Living very intently inside my own quiet world.

It was one of the most rewarding things I had ever done.

Since then, I have met so many women whose solo trips became defining chapters, moments they point to and say: that changed me. Watching women today, single, married, at every stage of life, bravely choosing to go alone and sharing their hard-won stories with each other, it is breathtaking. They are choosing, boldly, how to live.

Last year I watched it happen again, this time with my own daughter. It was last minute, born out of the kind of teenage friendship upheaval that can quietly level a kid, and I knew the answer wasn't to wait it out. It was to move. I put her on a solo flight from the US to Nice to spend the summer with my college friend in France.

It was not a perfectly orchestrated plan. It was a village. A friend on standby in case something went wrong with the flight in Philly. A wonderful group of women in France ready to receive her on the other side. Women showing up at every stop of the journey to make sure she landed, literally and figuratively, somewhere safe and full of possibility.

That trip changed her. It gave her the confidence and the escape she needed at exactly the right moment.

She is now looking at international university programs as she launches in 2027. One solo flight, and her whole sense of what is possible expanded. That is what going alone does. At 25 or 17 or 50+, in a foreign café or on a transatlantic flight. The world gets bigger the moment you trust yourself to move through it alone.

What Solo Travel Actually Is

There is a version of solo travel that gets sold to women as a spiritual extreme sport. Eat Pray Love. Find yourself in Bali. Have a crisis and emerge spiritually renovated, draped in linen. That is not what I am talking about.

I am talking about the Saturday you drive to a town three hours away and spend the day eating things you want to eat, wandering into shops that interest only you, sitting at a bar at 3 pm because you feel like it and nobody needs you home. The long weekend where you book a hotel room with an obscenely comfortable bed and sleep until 9 am without anyone's needs prying you out of it.

I have a married friend who takes one long weekend a year, no husband, no kids, just her. She does not go far and it is not glamorous. But she says she has to have it. That one weekend is how she recalibrates, remembers who she is outside of everyone she loves, and comes back to her life with something replenished that nothing else quite refills.

Solo travel, in its truest form, is not about escape. It's about return.

You are returning to your own preferences. Your own pace. Your own curiosity. The version of you that exists before she calibrates herself to everyone else in the room.

The Identity You Find When No One is Watching

At home, you are always in relation to someone. You are someone's mother, someone's partner, someone's colleague, someone's daughter. These roles are real and they matter. But they also, quietly, shape how you move through every room you enter.

On a solo trip, you are nobody's anything. You are just a woman at a table, on a train, on a street corner trying to figure out which direction is north. And in that anonymity, something unexpected happens: you get to choose who you are. Not who you are to someone else. Who you are, full stop.

Maybe you find out you love mornings, that without anyone to accommodate you naturally wake early and walk and feel most alive before the city does. Maybe you find out you have been moving through your whole life at someone else's pace, and your own pace is slower, and that slowness is a gift.

Or maybe you find out something harder: that you have been so thoroughly defined by your roles that you genuinely don't know what moves you or makes you feel alive. That is the most important thing you could have found out. Because now you know what work to do.

The Fear (Let's Just Name It)

There is the practical fear: Is it safe? What if I get lonely, lost, or just profoundly bored with my own company?

And then there is the deeper fear, the one we don't say out loud: What if I discover I like being alone too much? What if I come back different, and the life I come back to feels smaller than I thought?

That fear is not irrational. Solo travel does change you. It recalibrates your sense of what you are capable of, what you need, what you are willing to settle for. It gives you a reference point you cannot un-have.

Good. Let it change you. That is the point.

A woman who knows who she is when she is alone brings more, not less, to every relationship in her life. She is harder to diminish. She has real, embodied evidence that she is capable of more than the life she has been handed.

The Loneliness That Turns Into Something Else

Solo travel can be lonely, especially in the first 24 hours. There is a moment, usually at dinner or watching a beautiful sunset, where the absence of another person aches.

Stay with that feeling. Don't reach for your phone to fill it. Sit in it, because something interesting happens on the other side.

It turns into solitude. And solitude, it turns out, is a completely different animal.

Loneliness is the ache of missing connection. Solitude is the quiet pleasure of your own presence. One contracts you. The other expands you. Most women have been so surrounded by people needing things from them for decades that they have never had the chance to discover what their own solitude actually feels like.

Start Smaller Than You Think You Need To

You don't have to book a flight to Portugal tomorrow. Start with a night in a hotel in a city two hours from home. Book a table at a restaurant you have wanted to try. Wake up with nowhere to be and no one to be responsible for and see what that feels like in your body.

Pay attention to what happens. Notice what you reach for. Notice whether the silence feels like emptiness or like oxygen.

Then go a little farther. And keep going until you have spent enough time alone in the world to remember what you are like when nobody needs anything from you.

That woman, relaxed, unperformed, curious, free, she is the one you have been trying to get back to.

She has been waiting for you.

Worth Reading

Books

• Wild by Cheryl Strayed. The one that opened the door for all of us. A woman at rock bottom, a 1,100-mile hike alone through the wilderness, and the version of herself she found on the other side. Read it if you haven't. Reread it if you have.

• Alone Time by Stephanie Rosenbloom. Four cities. Four seasons. Four solo trips that weren't epic adventures but were deeply, quietly life-changing. Paris, Istanbul, Florence, New York. This one is for the woman who thinks she doesn't have time to go far.

• Without Reservations by Alice Steinbach. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist takes a solo sabbatical through Europe in her 40s to rediscover who she is outside of every role she plays. Elegant, honest, and exactly the book you hand to a friend who says she could never do this.

• Tales of a Female Nomad by Rita Golden Gelman. She was in her late 40s when her world fell apart. Her answer was to get on a plane and not stop moving. What she found was not a new life but a truer one.

  
  

Worth Bookmarking

• Be My Travel Muse (bemytravelmuse.com). Kristin Addis has traveled solo to 65+ countries and has been writing about it for over a decade. Her destination guides for solo women are some of the most practical and honest on the internet. Start with her best solo female travel destinations list and go from there.

• The Solo Female Traveler Network (thesolofemaletravelernetwork.com). A robust community and resource hub with destination guides organized by month, group tours if you want company, and real trip reports from women who have been where you want to go.

• Girl About the Globe (girlabouttheglobe.com). 119 countries solo. Her destination breakdowns are thorough, safety-focused, and written for women who are actually deciding whether to book, not just dreaming about it.

  
  

Have you taken a solo trip that changed you? Or is there one you have been waiting years to take? Tell us about it. The SAF community wants to know, and might need the nudge to book theirs.