Boldly Go Solo

How to set out solo, but not travel alone: Trips, tips and ideas for the active traveler.

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Category: Trip Tips

  • Make the busboys your dining companions

    On a scrap of paper somewhere, I have a recipe for a caramelized onion salad. It came from Jesus, a Cuban guy who cooked the delicious appetizer for me in an Arizona restaurant. I was sitting alone in the mostly empty dining room. Phoenix in May is not a prime destination. It’s a rotisserie. But…

  • Plan your solo vacation yourself or let someone else do it for you?

    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…

  • Hiking 15 miles on Martha’s Vineyard, then sitting down for an intimate dinner for a dozen

    <–Turtle sighting! I did not go solo on a 15-mile hike on Martha’s Vineyard on Saturday. Six of us set out on the annual cross-island walk. That turned into a whopping baker’s dozen during a mid-morning break. That’s because my friend Joan, whose house we were staying at for the weekend, knows about a zillion…

  • Comfortably eating alone in Dublin

    Here are the top five Dublin restaurants for solo travelers, according to venere, a European hotel booking site similar to hotels.com. The site chooses these eating establishments for pluses such as: Avoca: "…the staff won’t blink at lone diners…" Cake Cafe: "…half the city is unaware of it’s location so you’ll almost always be able…

  • Travel on your own to these seven spots, and all over the world

    The editors at Frommer’s recently chose seven places suited for solo travel, from Istanbul to Mexico to Texas. Great trips are to be found in many places they left out, obviously, but they state their case for each pick. So, here, forthwith, are the: 7 top spots for the solo traveler.  

  • Juan and the Bean Store: A vacation parable

    I've been reading lately about a trend called "slow travel." The gist of it is that instead of the "If It's Tuesday This Must Be Belgium" style of frenetic travel, people are encouraged to slow down. Spend a week in one place. Live like a local, instead of a tourist. Don't try to see absolutely…

  • A blowgun, a banana and a Quechua family in Ecuador’s rain forest

    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…

  • Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, and the Northern Ireland connection

    Mary, Mary, quite contrary, is alive and well and living in a neo-classical house in Northern Ireland. I couldn’t believe it either. There really is a Mary! Actually, there’s a Mairi. As in Mairi, Mairi, quite contrary.And her garden still grows. It’s landscaped and huge and filled with silver bells (campanulas) and Pretty Maids (saxifraga)…

  • Loving travel, despite the pre-trip anxiety

    If you love to travel and do it a lot, it should be as easy to get on a plane as venturing out for a quart of milk, right? Wrong. A few months ago, I wrote about the difficulty many travel writers have before every trip. They poured their hearts out on a thread on…

  • Journeywoman: a maze of travel tips and info

    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…