This might sound a little dramatic, but I can remember the exact moment I decided I was never traveling with people again.
…Yeah, like I said, dramatic.
OK, so that’s not entirely true. I have had some pretty awesome experiences traveling with people! BUT, after taking a few solo trips now, I’m convinced traveling alone is the best way to travel.
My first solo trip happened almost on accident. Early last year, I took a 10-day four-country backpacking trip through Europe with my then-boyfriend. It was a miserable experience that left me feeling incredibly insecure about my ability to travel and enjoy it.
At the time, I thought I was the reason the trip sucked. Turns out, when your travel companion is incredibly selfish and inconsiderate, and — oh — had also JUST cheated on you, there’s actually no possible way to have a fun trip. Go figure.
After moping around for several months because this jerk had completely convinced me I was an inflexible and boring stick-in-the-mud, I spontaneously booked a flight back to Europe as a way to kind of reclaim the continent. I wanted to prove to myself that I did know how to travel, and I was a fun person, dammit!
I bought my plane ticket on a whim, figuring I’d find somebody willing to venture over to Germany with me for a few days.
You’ve heard this before, but I couldn’t find anyone able or willing to join me. So, I ended up traveling overseas alone for the first time on a four-day trip to Berlin.
If you missed it, that trip was one of the best trips I’ve ever taken, and I now consider it to be a fundamental turning point in my life.
I came back from that trip feeling completely fulfilled. It accomplished what I wanted it to accomplish: I proved to myself that I am capable of traveling and enjoying it, and I (bolded and italicized for maximum emphasis) was not the reason my 10-day Europe trip sucked.
Nuh uh. Nope. It was the shitty cheating childish boyfriend.
Because I had such a great time traveling alone to Germany, I decided to try it again back in February. I booked another four-day solo trip, this time to Mexico. Like I mentioned in that post, I was genuinely concerned that my Berlin trip was a one-off fluke, and that it had set the bar so high that any future solo trip I took wouldn’t measure up.
Again, those worries were for nothing because my trip to Tulum was just as good as, if not better than, my trip to Berlin.
Side note: I know my little four-day international trips are really sad and lame and pathetic in the grand scheme of things, and I would really love to do a massively long extended solo trip… but, alas, I am an American adult with a full-time job and a limited number of vacation days. So, I’ll take what I can get.
While I realize I’m still a little new to the solo travel thing — and my experiences pale in comparison to others — this is my blog so I’m gonna share my thoughts, dammit!
So, here are all the reasons I love and prefer traveling alone.
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YOU MAKE THE PLANS.
If you’re traveling with a group of friends, there’s a lot of compromise involved. Maybe you don’t want to spend the time and money at a museum. Maybe you have better things to do than spend an entire afternoon shopping for luxury goods. Maybe you want to make a spreadsheet full of the attractions you want to see. Maybe you want to dive head-first into a destination with absolutely no plans at all. Maybe you want to wake up at 6 to sightsee. Maybe you want to stay up until 6 to party. Really, it doesn’t matter! If you’re traveling alone, you can do what you wanna do, when you wanna do it. Period.
YOU SET THE BUDGET.
Your money, your rules. You don’t wanna pay for a posh hotel room? You don’t have to. You wanna drop $75 on a single meal? You have that luxury. There’s no compromise involved in terms of money when you’re traveling by yourself, and that means you can be as thrifty or spendy as you want, and nobody’s going to fight you over it.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spent more than I’ve felt comfortable spending, just because I was inadvertently pressured into it by the people I was traveling with. Similarly, I’ve also had to skip out on things I wanted to experience, due to the financial constraints of my travel companion(s).
YOU MAKE THE TIME.
I can’t even tell you how many potential trips I skipped out on in the past because I couldn’t find a friend able/ willing to take the time off work. If you’re traveling solo, you can immediately book whatever trip to wherever, whenever it’s convenient for you. Easy peasy.
YOU MEET THE PEOPLE.
If you’re traveling with a friend or significant other, odds are, you’re only gonna talk to that person. I mean, you might end up chatting with a couple strangers and making a friend or two, but for the most part? You have your companionship. However, if you’re traveling alone, you’re pretty much forced to strike up conversations with strangers — talking to travelers at your hostel bar, asking passersby to take your photo, bumming an iPhone cord off the person in the seat next to you on the bus.
Traveling alone has yielded some pretty amazing friendships for me. I traveled solo to Nashville and ended up making friends in my hostel room… one of which I met up with during last year’s trip to Germany. I traveled solo to Germany and made friends at my hostel bar… one of which I ended up flying out to San Francisco to visit. At this point now, I’ve got friends I can visit on pretty much every continent. I wouldn’t have met most of them if I hadn’t been traveling by myself.
YOU GET THE OPPORTUNITY TO BE IN THE MOMENT AND SELF-REFLECT.
This one’s a little cheesy, but I can think of incredibly vivid moments during my solo travels that I wouldn’t have remembered, had I had company.
Allowing the heavy feeling of isolation to flood my senses as I trudged through a German Holocaust memoral, letting the tears freely flow.
Lounging on a towel in a grassy patch near a Mexican cenote and listening to an upbeat song on Spotify as the sun dried my hair.
Listlessly idling and observing the morning rush over an aromatic latte at a Nashville coffee shop.
Traveling solo means you get so much time alone with your thoughts, which means you get the luxury of focusing only on yourself, and not on the person next to you. You get to experience life around you, uninterrupted, and you get to take it in as you please.
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So, yeah. I’m sure there are a ton more reasons as to why traveling alone is better than traveling with companions, but so far after my few meager solo trips, those are the best reasons I could think of. Here’s to hoping that my future includes more solo trips (I’m sure it will!) so I can expand on this list.
Happy travels!
