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  • Outdoors
  • Flagstaff
  • Travel
    • Travel
    • India (Yoga Teacher Training)
    • Peace Corps Ukraine
  • Lifestyle
    • Forestry + wildfire (my day job)
    • Yoga (my night job)
    • Our huskies
    • Recipes (cooking + baking)
    • Sustainability
    • Books + movies + music
    • Skincare + haircare + physical self-care
    • DIY + decor
    • Chicago (I used to live here)
    • Odds and Ends
  • Stuff I like
  • About
    • About Randi
    • Contact
    • Professional ish (AKA: portfolio)
    • Disclosure and privacy policy

Why I love (and prefer!) to travel alone

April 9, 2019 March 18, 2025 Randi2925 views

This might sound a little dramatic, but I can remember the exact moment I decided I was never traveling with people again.

It was a crisp fall day in Germany, and I was sitting at Berlin Schoenefeld Airport, propped up on my backpack in a state of exhaustion. I was waiting for a budget airline to carry me through my layover in Iceland and back home to Chicago after a long-weekend birthday trip I’d booked in a dramatic flurry after a really bad breakup.

…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.

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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.

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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.

Me! Alone! In Mexico! One admitted downside of solo traveling: There’s nobody readily available to take super cute ‘grammable photos of you.

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.

Standing on the roof of my hostel in Rishikesh, India, where I spent a few days during a solo trip.

・・・

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.

I snuck away while my travel companion slept in during my birthday trip to Paris a few years back. I got to explore the city’s Latin Quarter and visit Hemingway’s former apartment — something that didn’t interest my friend in the slightest.
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).

I spent money booking a tour at Hatch Show Print when I went to Nashville solo. I really doubt I would have been able to convince any of my friends to pay the admission fee for this.
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.

I took this photo on a Thursday in Mexico, when all my friends were at work and therefore unable to travel with me. No problem.
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.

From left-to-right: Solo travelers Harriet, Michelle, Maria and me at a rooftop bar in Nashville in July 2017…
…and Maria and I, reunited years later in October 2018, when I was visiting her hometown of Berlin!
From left to right: Giorgos, Keanan, me, Panos, Ty and Caitlin in Berlin in October 2018…
…and me and Ty in January of this year, when he graciously let me crash with him at his home in San Francisco.
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 trudge through a German Holocaust memorial, letting the tears freely flow.

Lounging on a towel in a grassy patch near a Mexican cenote as an upbeat song filters through my headphones and the afternoon sun dries my hair.

Watching floating fire embers extinguish against a night sky as the sounds of a chanted Hindu mantra reverberate in the background.

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.

Watching the sun rise in the Himalayan foothills of northern India during a solo trek to Rishikesh, India.

・・・

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 solo travels!

This post was originally published April 9, 2019. It was last updated March 18, 2025… which means, yes, my future has included more solo trips and has allowed me to expand on this list. 😉

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Randi with an i

Randi M. Shaffer

Hi! I'm Randi. I spend my days working in forestry and wildfire, my nights instructing yoga and my weekends exploring northern Arizona (and beyond). I'm a former journalist, a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer and a Midwest native. Welcome!

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