Boldly Go Solo

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

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  • A Times Square moment

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    New York City is in a class of its own. And while it is someplace I like to go with others (I grew up just outside the city and often visited my grandmother, who lived on the Lower East Side), it’s the kind of place that will wrap itself around you even if you visit alone.

    In fact, it can be difficult to stick with your friends or family because the sidewalks can get so crowded. And yet it’s a great place to walk and gawk and shop and buy hot pretzels on the street and people watch and just stare in awe at what city planners have wrought.

    Today I had a few minutes on my own in Times Square, where the ball will drop on New Year’s Eve, as always. From a flagpole at One Times Square. I took these photos in just a one-and-a-half block area. It’s hard to convey the sensory bounty of it all via still photos, when practically every billboard has moving parts or flashing lights!

    New York City Things To Do

  • A soul cake, a soul cake, and happy holidays

    "A soul cake, a soul cake" is the refrain that has been going through my head all day. It started when I visited the D.C. Holiday market where a banjo player sang the old British number, right after "Frosty the Snowman."

    Turns out it's a song sung on Halloween or All Saints' Day. But since I'd never heard it before and may never hear it again, I will forever associate it with December, the holiday season and the holiday market.

    View the video below at your peril! You might be humming it all day long as well. Just in case, I included the lyrics after the video. I took it at F and Seventh streets in D.C., across the street from the Spy Museum, where the holiday market was set up until yesterday.

    Happy holidays. Peace.

    Download DC Holiday Market


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  • Solo travel that goes on and on and on

    I'm a working stiff who has a few weeks vacation a year. So I choose the easy road to solo travel. I go on active adventure tours that organizers have planned for me. I usually wander on my own for a few days before or after, trying to pack in as much walking, museum going and "highlight attractions" viewing as I can.

    But you know that if you've been reading this blog for any length of time.

    On the "extreme" end of traveling alone are the people – often from Australia and New Zealand – who take a "gap year" before or after university, or travel for months on end at some point in their lives after quitting a job. Or before getting one. I met several of these folks while I was teaching English to Spaniards last year.

    If that's something you dream about, you should look into the Web sites that focus on getting your act together for long-term travel. One such travel site is How to Travel the World, written by an experienced solo traveler who offers advice for long-term solo travelers.

    Rolf Pott's Vagabonding is another site with stories and tips. And I'm sure there are many more. Safe travels to those who are going to be on the road for a long, long time.

  • You can’t shop for “surprise” gifts when you bring the recipients along.

    Peter Petraglia
    When I wrote about my     youth hostel stay in Pennsylvania a couple of entries ago, I didn't mention the great shopping I did the day of arrival.

    If anyone lives within a couple of hours of New Hope, PA, and still has Christmas shopping to do, you'll just HAVE to go alone. You can't bring the people you're buying for now, can you? And you don't want to be slowed down when there's so much to see. And buy.

    New Hope is this great town with one long street of gallery after gallery, boutique after boutique, with artists galore. Stores selling handcrafted glass boxes and lamps, Florentine leather, hand-painted kitchen tools. The best thing is that the town, and those nearby, try desperately to woo and retain independent merchants rather than chain stores.Hugh Breckenridge-The Valley, Gratz Gallery

    Always a plus in a world where Starbucks and McDonald's worm their way in just about everywhere.

    Like it or not (in terms of political correctness), you won't find a sign saying, "Unattended children will be sold as slaves," in your neighborhood Abercrombie, as I did in one of the tchotchke shops there. The independents always offer something, whether oddball humor, offbeat charm or great finds.

    In all, 280 shops, restaurants and galleries. That's one large artists' community. If it's too late for the holidays, there are always birthdays to buy for.

    Art:

    Peter Petraglia, "Forward Approach."

    Hugh Breckenridge, "The Valley."

     

  • Discounts, discounts. Get your travel discounts here.

    Iguazu Falls-Ellen Perlman
    Since I'm all about adventure travel, it was interesting to read on the     SmarterTravel Web site that several companies are offering discounts on 2009 trips. Actually, the entry offers up about 100 of the "best discounted trips," although the choices are from only five different companies.

    For instance, Mountain Travel Sobek, an expensive company, is offering to cut $400 off a dogsledding trip to Sweden's Ice Hotel (how's that for a wildly different vacation?) It includes four days of dog sledding and two days of sledding with reindeer.

    BUT…the trip costs about $6,500 for 10 days, including internal airfares and the single supplement! And that does NOT include airfare to get to Stockholm. Shocking.

    $400 isn't going to make a dent. Mountain Travel Sobek is one of those companies that I likely will never travel with, but I do enjoy looking at their offerings and wondering how the other half…or is it the other 2 percent?…live.

    But it might be worth checking to see if the discounts offered by Backroads, iExplore, G.A.P. Adventures or Overseas Adventure Travel (which is eliminating the single supplement on 24 adventures as I wrote about here) are worthwhile, in terms of your finances.

    Photo: Iguazu Falls, Argentina side (as opposed to Brazil)

    By Ellen Perlman


  • The Space Center and other Houston museums that might interest solo travelers

    "Houston's too humid," commented the Alec Baldwin character recently, on the show "30 Rock" created by Tina Fey, aka Sarah Palin, of Saturday Night Live.Space capsule-Ellen Perlman  

    Houston, you've got a problem. When people think about the city at all, negative adjectives crop up. Oil and gas. Humidity. Or no image at all. I admit I was one of those people who had no picture of the city in my mind whatsoever.

    But after visiting recently to attend a travel writers' conference – during which the tourism people worked hard to fill our minds with positive impressions – I have to say I was amazed to learn how much there is to see and do in the city.

    If you like museums you could easily fill up days and days museum hopping. I prefer going to museums alone rather than hanging with someone as I go room to room. I don't like having to keep one eye on a companion and another on the art. Or whatever it is I'm viewing.

    As for Houston's offerings, The Museum of Fine Arts is impressive. The Health Museum, on the campus of the Texas Medical Center, is interactive and fun. (Want to see a visual of how your face will age? Yikes!) The Houston Museum of Natural Science had Body Worlds 2, a display of human bodies which I found unsettling but some people are fascinated by.

    Part of the Saturn V rocket-Ellen PerlmanThe biggest surprise for me was Space Center Houston.

     I didn't expect to like it. I'm not that into shuttles and space labs and such, other than to applaud safe landings and historic firsts. But I was mucho impressed once there. By the size of the Saturn V rocket on display (it's enormous!).

    By footage of astronauts on the moon that I don't recall seeing before (including an astronaut falling on his face in that big, bulky spacesuit and saying something to the effect of, "oops.") At being able to touch a moon rock. At seeing a space capsule that astronauts returned to earth in, its exterior burned up by re-entering the atmosphere.Ellen and friend

    My only regret was being with a tour group with a time limit and not being able to spend as much time as I would have liked.

    Photos: Ellen Perlman. 1. Space capsule. 2. Saturn V rocket. 

    Photo: By a stranger. Ellen and "astronaut" friend. The kid side of the museum.

    (My friend's son Samuel would LOVE the Space Center. A very happy birthday to you, Samuel!)

  • A solo traveler gets treated to a Christmas party at a Pennsylvania youth hostel

    It being December, I'm reminded of a night I spent at a stone mansion in Quakertown, getting a taste of a Pennsylvania Christmas. Not having been to the manor born, this mansion experience provided a little taste of the high life.

    But actually, it was a youth hostel. I was researching a travel story for The Washington Post on hosteling and I called the Weisel Hostel because it's within driving distance of Washington, D.C.Weisel youth hostel

    My hosts welcomed me to sign up for
    the night but apologized at the same time. Since they live in the
    100-year-old country estate, as well as run the hostel there, they were inviting their neighbors for a
    Christmas open house the night I was going to stay.

    It wasn't going to be a quiet night, they warned. But I was welcome to join the festivities.

    I arrived after dark at the huge stone house in Nockamixon State Park (the hostel is operated by the Bucks County Department of Parks and Recreation) and let myself in. The first to greet me was Gunther, the dog.

    Next were hosts John and Geri Ann McLaughlin and their two girls. I was to be the only paying guest that night. So I had a huge private room with my choice of any one of 10 bunk beds. Top or bottom.

    What a great place. In the middle of nowhere. And that night, all decorated with red bows and welcoming lights. (That's the one problem with U.S. youth hostels. They're often far from public transportation. I went by car).

    A couple of hours later, the "partying" began. My $15 guest fee got me not only a bed, but food and entertainment. Christmas caroling around a bonfire. Hot chocolate in front of an indoor fireplace. And a huge selection of homemade cookies. And no need to help with cleanup. There were plenty of neighbor teens who were conscripted for that.

    Nice.

  • No single supplement?!

    Whoa. Can this be true? A company called Overseas Adventure Travel, catering to travelers over 50, plans to eliminate the single supplement for all its land tours in 2009. And for many of its cruises, according to a USA Today blog entry.

    But if you're not retired, be prepared to save up those vacation days. The group seems to run long trips – 13, 15, 17 days long and longer.

    On another front, the company has found that the number of women traveling solo has more than tripled over the past five years. So it plans to launch a women-only line of vacations. That pretty much guarantees there won't be a lot of couples on those trips!

    But I'm still marveling at the no single supplement thing. Is the travel world as we know it changing?

  • It’s never too late to start traveling solo

    Suppose you really, really wanted to travel to do something. Say, go to the Superbowl. Or the inauguration of the first black U.S. president. Or to the Olympics. Would you stay home because you had no one to go with?450px-John_F._Kennedy_Center,_interior_000_0017

    Yes, many people would. And do. But not a 76-year-old woman named Marlene who I had breakfast with the other week at a Washington DC, bed and breakfast (and blogged about here.) She has traveled to DC from Atlanta eight times, to treat herself to one of her favorite things: the opera.

    And she went to Europe on her own last year. It's not that she's opposed to having a travel companion. But a good one's not that easy to find. "It's fine if you're compatible with your likes and dislikes but where I'm from, 'opera' is a foreign word."

    Marlene likes staying at the Embassy Circle Guest House now that she's found it. "I like the personal relationships you build sitting around the breakfast table together." She usually stays pretty quiet though, listening to others, as she did mostly when I was at the table. Until we all turned to her and asked her about her travels.

    Turns out her husband died in 2000. They had raised two children together and couldn't always afford to travel. When her life radically changed eight years ago, and she was left on her own, she started traveling immediately. Solo. 

    And get this. She has a terrible sense of direction, and yet she's out and about without hesitation. And gets lost all the time. She relies on people to get her turned in the right direction. "I'm not embarrassed to ask questions any more."

    A lot of people she runs into can't believe she travels on her own. They ask her if she's afraid. "What's there to be afraid of," she says matter-of-factly. Excellent question, Marlene. What exactly is there to be afraid of?

    Photo: Interior of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where the Washington Opera performs.

  • Find a city’s markets: farmer’s, arts and crafts, holiday and more.

    Market-otavalo3
    'Tis the season of the holiday markets, known in Europe as Christmas markets. They can be found in cities all over the world. 

    I was just in New York City for Thanksgiving with family and stopped off at the Grand Central Terminal Holiday Fair for a quick peek before catching a train upstate. This is the fourth year out of the past 10 that I've made it to one or another of New York's holiday markets.

    Score! A velvety black scarf with a colorful, artistic pattern and a gold necklace, choker length. What do you mean, who am I buying them for? Me, of course.

    The two other great holiday markets I've been to are the Holiday Shops at Bryant Park and the Union Square Holiday Market. There's one at Columbus Circle I've yet to explore.

    We're talking hundreds of artisans and vendors. New York's markets are fashioned after the Northern European holiday markets that set up in public squares and piazzas. (Bring your scarf and mittens, even if you plan to buy more. It's usually cold out there.)

    Markets of all kinds appeal to me as a solo traveler. They're good for people watching, buying unique local gifts and getting a sense of the locale and its residents. Radishes3, DC farmers market-Ellen Perlman

    I've sought them out in Saquisili and Otavalo, Ecuador, where I didn't recognize half the exotic fruits. (More on Ecuador here and here.) There was El Rastro, the flea market in Madrid. Christkindlmarkt Bethlehem in Pennsylvania. The leather stalls in Florence, Italy. And so many more. I'm itching to go shopping as we speak!

    And right here in Washington, D.C., we have Eastern Market, the last of Washington's 19th century markets to remain in continuous operation. It has a flea market, a food market and arts and crafts and jewelry galore.

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