Introducing Travel Tuesdays!
With this post, I’m inaugurating a plan to write regularly about expanding both your literal and figurative horizons through travel. I probably won’t manage to do a travel post every Tuesday, but I do plan to limit my travel posts to Tuesdays so people who aren’t interested in travel can skip reading on that day of the week.
I want to start out with a topic that’s especially dear to my heart: solo travel. Specifically, if you’ve never traveled alone before, where do you start?
A lot of people — especially women — react to the idea of traveling alone with some variation of “Oh, I could never.” And it’s true, traveling alone — especially if you’re a woman — involves certain considerations that don’t come up when you’re with others. But by and large, the world isn’t nearly as dangerous as people tend to think, and using common sense will generally keep you out of trouble. And as I noted in a previous post, traveling solo also has unique advantages.
Nonetheless, going somewhere new on your own can be intimidating, so I recommend easing into it step by step:
1. Go somewhere you’ve already been. This gives you the comfort of familiarity — you probably already have a few favorite restaurants, a hotel you’ve stayed at before, maybe even local friends you can see or stay with. I’ve never actually lived in New York, but I’ve visited so many times over the last 20 years that when I get there, it feels like home, subway and all. I can get to at least a couple of well-liked restaurants on autopilot when I’m tired and ravenous — heck, I can actually give directions to tourists sometimes.
2. Go somewhere domestic that you’ve never been. For my first solo trip outside the continental US, I went to the north shore of Oahu, which is quieter and less touristed than Honolulu. It was familiar enough that I didn’t feel completely out of my depth — the street signs were familiar and everyone spoke English — but I still sat on the white sand beach, eating Spam musubi, the semi-official food of the Hawaiian Islands, feeling like I was definitely not at home.
3. Go somewhere far away but still English-speaking (or whatever your native tongue is). You might choose Jamaica, Vancouver, or the Australian outback. I chose London because I’m an Anglophile, a history buff, and a city lover. In a single week, I packed in 2000 years of history, a little Shakespeare, a lot of museums, many many Tube rides, a fair bit of sitting around people-watching and chatting with locals in pubs, and more curry than I ordinarily eat in a year. I felt completely at ease, and that trip primed the travel pump for the next step:
4. Go somewhere far away where you don’t speak the language. Okay, I cheated a bit on this one; I went to Rome, where a lot of people do speak English, and where in any event I could make myself understood in a pinch by breaking out my rusty French. If you don’t share my Euro-fetish and you’re up for it, go to Russia, China, Thailand — someplace where the language is not only unfamiliar, but written in another alphabet. Experiment with having a good time while being functionally illiterate and able to communicate only (or mostly) in sign language.
Wherever you opt to go, you might want to plan out these early trips a little more than you ordinarily would. If you usually fly by the seat of your pants, consider at least booking your lodging before you leave home. If you’ve never ridden Eurail, study the website carefully to make sure you order the right pass. Buy a guidebook or two, even if you only read it on the plane and leave it in your hotel room once you arrive. Unless you’re preternaturally self-confident and relaxed in unfamiliar situations, you’ll enjoy your trip more if you have at least a small notion of what to expect.
More travel thoughts on future Tuesdays! In the meantime, tell me what you think. Was this helpful? Interesting? Inspiring? What do you want me to discuss next?
