Boldly Go Solo
How to set out solo, but not travel alone: Trips, tips and ideas for the active traveler.
Category: –Tour Operators
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I’m standing high on a mountain in California on a hot summer day, my hiking boots planted at the top edge of a large patch of snow. One of the last remaining from the winter. I take in the scenery. The snow-kissed Sierra Nevada Mountains. The stoic evergreen trees. A verdant mountain meadow below. Then,…
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"Boy, did you ever hit a sore spot with me." That was the comment from a woman named Martha Miller who was responding to my story on single supplements, published recently in the Dallas Morning News. (and also here, if that link's expired) Her anger is directed at the tour operators I wrote about. It's…
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Riding horses across the Masai Mara, a large reserve park in Southwestern Kenya, is something I’d love to do. Paying $5,675 plus $875 for the single supplement is something I really don’t want to do. And won’t. In this case, even if I were spared the single supplement, I wouldn’t shell out close to $6,000…
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Sometime during my early 20’s, my adventurous father treated me to a trip on a windjammer cruise off the coast of Long Island, in New York. In those days, I wasn’t traveling on my own. But I could see how easy it would have been to sail alone on a small boat like that and…
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My friend Elaine was hesitant to admit that she was glad I didn’t join her on her recent trip out West. But no insult taken. I understood that it meant she’d had a fabulous time. She went out to Utah a few weeks ago without knowing a soul. All packed and ready for a biking…
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This solo travel concept seems alien to many people in the travel biz. That’s unfortunate. I recently sent out a query asking if anyone in the industry particularly catered to the solo traveler. I was thinking of such things as a break on the room charge, since only one person is paying the bill. Or…
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USTOA says you can save a lot of money on vacations by signing up for packaged tours instead of planning a trip on your own. Well, of course, they’d say that. Their members are the ones packaging those tours, and making money from them. The thing is, they’re right in a lot of cases. Particularly…
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I’m in the middle of booking a four-day weekend in Victoria, British Columbia. Now I remember why I like traveling with tour operators. What a hassle it is to make my own arrangements!I’m going to Seattle for my day job and decided it was a great excuse to do something else in the Northwest or…
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Who knew how hard it could be to hit a banana hanging from a tree with a blowgun's dart? From 20 feet away. Take my word, it's tough. I can only imagine the challenge of using that blowgun, loaded with darts coated with curare, to target a monkey swinging from branch to branch. Or a…
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I landed the other day on the "largest collection of women-centered travel classifieds on the Internet." I know this only because the site told me so. A site called Journeywoman. I’d been meaning to write about Journeywoman for the longest time. It’s just that I find it difficult to describe exactly what it is. What…
Boldly Go Solo 