I planned a trip on a luxury river cruise with a potential suitor I met through friends in Barcelona. He was from a municipality in Spain called Valladolid, and his eagerness to travel together was evident from the first time we met.
I spent a week backpacking through Europe solo before my partner joined me. I should have booked more time by myself.
15.09.2023 - 14:37 / insider.com
Solo travel can be lonely.
Take it from me. I've explored seven different countries by myself in the last two years.
As a travel reporter, I often find myself traveling alone. I've taken 30-hour train rides up and down the East Coast, spent seven nights on the world's largest cruise ship sailing the Caribbean Sea, and traveled by rail to Niagara Falls, Montréal, and Québec City.
In October 2022, when I took a two-week train backpacking trip through four European countries: Germany, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland. While my partner joined me when I got to Italy, I spent the first week exploring Berlin and Vienna alone, taking overnight trains from one country to the next.
I was excited to do it. Europe is a popular destination among solo backpackers, and, after traveling around North America for work, I felt ready for the next step — solo travel on another continent.
Still, I found my first week in Europe to be challenging. Getting used to navigating and exploring on my own took some time without having someone else to share the process with, making the first few days difficult to fully enjoy.
But by the end of the solo portion of my journey, I felt settled into the nomadic lifestyle and confident in my abilities to navigate cities on my own. I loved having my partner experience the second half of my trip with me, but I left Europe wishing I had given myself more time alone to fully immerse myself in these new places. Each challenging moment I faced alone gave me an opportunity to grow, which is easier to see now as I look back on the trip than it was in the moment.
There were times when I went to the wrong train station, got caught in the rain, and struggled to sleep. These were opportunities to practice my creative problem-solving skills, like when I arrived in Vienna after a sleepless night on a train and had to find a last-minute hotel booking at 7 a.m.
I also learned that not dwelling on these hard times helped me stay positive. When I finally found a hotel in Vienna that morning, I framed it as a small win to celebrate finding exactly what I needed.
Traveling solo also made me appreciate traveling with someone else in new ways. When my partner joined me in Italy and Switzerland, he saw how much I'd grown in just seven days, like when we planned to roast sausages over a fire at our Airbnb in a Swiss village. On the train ride to our Airbnb, we realized that the only grocery store in town was closed.
Right away, I started problem-solving. I grabbed my partner's hand and ran off the train three stops before the village to find somewhere else to buy dinner. After scanning the internet, I found only one open store — a gas station that was a 25-minute walk away.
"Whatever they have, we'll be
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