Lifestyle
You owe it to yourself to go on a solo trip. Here’s how to plan one
In 2024, I planned to travel by myself to Slovenia — a country I had fallen in love with during my first visit 20 years prior.
It was going to be the first time I’d left my two young children for a week, and I was nervous. What if something bad happened to them while I was gone? How long would it take me to rebook three flights and get home?
But as soon as I began wandering Slovenia’s capital of Ljubljana alone, I was flooded with relief — and excitement. I couldn’t wait to explore the Julian Alps and spend time in the toplice, or thermal spas, without having to break for nap time or search for kid-friendly snacks.
Traveling alone can be one of the most rewarding things you can do for yourself, says journalist Marquita Harris, who spent 2021 traveling the world solo through Airbnb’s Live Anywhere program. It can be empowering to learn that you are capable and resilient — and that you can trust yourself.
But it can also be a little scary, she adds. “When you don’t have to cater to your partner or a friend or your kids, you’re arriving at a destination where the only person you have to rely on is yourself.”
If you’re curious about traveling solo, here’s how to plan a trip — and what to expect.
Author Amelia Edelman traveled solo to Slovenia in 2024. She shares the view from her climb to Ljubljana Castle, situated high above the country’s capital.
Amelia Edelman
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Amelia Edelman
Start small
To get a sense of how you plan, manage and meander when it’s all on you, go on a mini solo trip close to home, Harris says. “See if you can just have a beach day by yourself somewhere local.”
This can allow you to test the waters of solo travel and work up to bigger trips in the future.
Choose a destination that’s right for you
Ready for something more ambitious? Don’t just pick a destination that looks dreamy on Instagram. Choose a place that aligns with your unique trip goals.
Ask yourself: Why do I want to go on this trip? What do I want to do? Where do I want to go? How fast or slow do I want to move?
Use your answers to these questions to help you determine what type of solo trip — and destination — are right for you.
For example, if you’re reeling after a breakup or coping with burnout, you may want to book a chill mountainside cabin or stay somewhere with a spa. If you’re feeling energetic and psyched about meeting new people, head to your dream city across the planet and start exploring on foot.
Consider your comfort level
Aim for a place that’s navigable, welcoming and suited to how you want to travel.
Start with a destination where you speak the language, Harris says. That can make it easier to get around, read signs and menus, and start conversations with locals.
Equally important is understanding how a place might feel for you. A destination that feels safe and joyful for one traveler may not for another.
Harris’ family, for example, advised her against traveling solo to Rio de Janeiro. But the city ended up being deeply affirming for Harris.
“I’ve never been to a place where so many people looked like me,” she says. “I will sing its praises, especially for Black travelers.”
Edelman likes to keep things simple while solo traveling. She prefers sticking to just one course when dining, so it’s less of a production — but she won’t say no to tasting two wines.
Amelia Edelman
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Amelia Edelman
Beware the single supplement
While planning your trip, keep an eye out for the single supplement. It’s a premium that’s often charged to solo travelers by tours and cruise lines that could otherwise book two people into a room for a greater profit.
The add-on can range widely, from a $50-per-day single supplement on a 10-day Rick Steves tour to a full 200% of the stateroom cost on a Royal Caribbean cruise. (This is based on a double-occupancy stateroom; Royal Caribbean does have limited single-occupancy staterooms available.)
To determine whether there’s a single supplement on your tour or cruise, compare the cost of a double-occupancy room for two people versus a room for one, or inquire with the company if it’s not clear when booking on the site.
Joy Fox, a 90-year-old solo traveler who has been exploring the world on her own for nearly 70 years, recommends networks like Women Welcome Women World Wide and Solos. These organizations don’t charge the supplement and even provide additional resources and support that cater just to solo travelers.
Expect “traveler’s melancholy”
Even on the best solo trips, loneliness or sadness can rear their heads, especially if you find yourself alongside travelers who seem to all be paired up with friends, family or partners.
“They call it ‘traveler’s melancholy,’” Harris says. Eventually in her solo-travel year, “I got tired of myself. I needed to hear another voice besides my own.”
The author on a nighttime hike with new friends from her solo travels in Solčava, Slovenia, near the border with Austria.
Araceli Viqueira
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Araceli Viqueira
To cope with these feelings, Fox says to find small ways to make connections with others while traveling. “Smile. Give someone a compliment. Suddenly you’re not really on your own.”
And remember: Traveling by yourself does not mean you’re alone. “You’re gonna befriend the person who helps you up the mountain,” Harris says. “There’s always a friend somewhere.”
As for my “Solo-venia” trip, as I called it, of course there were moments when I missed my kids or surveyed a romantic sunset over the mountains and wished my partner were beside me.
But mostly, I traipsed through the forest on night hikes, met new friends from a dozen different countries and tried countless kinds of Slovenian wine — all without any tiny hands tugging at my clothes or little voices admitting, “Mama, I peed.” And that was worth every minute of my unwarranted pre-trip jitters.
Amelia Edelman is a writer, editor and content strategist who has worked with outlets such as the BBC, Lonely Planet and Travel + Leisure. She has traveled to 38 countries, often with her kids.
The story was edited by Malaka Gharib. Beck Harlan is the visual editor. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.
Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and sign up for our newsletter. Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekit.
Inde Navarrette and Michael Johnston in Obsession.
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Two big horror films, Obsession and Backrooms, just smashed all box office expectations. So much of their success has been driven by Gen Z, which is now the biggest moviegoing demographic. But what makes a movie a Gen Z movie? Today we’re bringing you an episode of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute. Host Brittany Luse talks about this trend with Sam Adams and Reanna Cruz.
If you want to hear more about these movies, check out these episodes:
In ‘Obsession,’ love hurts. It really, really, really hurts.
‘Backrooms’ brings YouTube horror to the big screen
Zendaya brings ‘The Drama,’ we bring the spoilers
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I regret to inform you I’ll need to keep this introduction brief. Not because there’s any lack of things to say about July’s crop of notable new releases; it features award-winning journalists and several different flavors of anxiety about our bleak ecological future and data-dominated present, as well as the welcome returns of several beloved novelists.
No, these books certainly deserve some love, dear readers. It’s just that I’m finding it a bit tough to type while bearhugging a box fan. And since it seems that may be my last best chance to get through this latest U.S. heat wave here on the east coast without sweating through my shirt, I feel some urgency to get back at it.
So enough with the ado. With any luck, you’ll soon be cracking open one of these great reads on the beach — or in front of a decent air-conditioning unit, at any rate.
You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, by Rachel Aviv (July 7)
Aviv, New Yorker staff writer and finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize, has a fairly extensive purview in her role as reporter at large. Still, when reviewing her latest work, Aviv noticed a crucial throughline: “I realized that, to some degree, I’d been writing about mother-daughter pairs for the last decade,” she explained to the Paris Review. Seeing this, she decided to collect and revise half a dozen of those stories, which cover ground from a daughter’s troubling fugue states to the immigrant nannies who must leave their own children behind, to Alice Munro’s daughter, whose claims of sexual abuse went unheeded yet regularly resurfaced in her mother’s fiction.
Country People, by Daniel Mason (July 7)
In Mason’s first novel since North Woods, 2023’s critical darling and book club stalwart, readers are plopped right back in the New England woods but the time scale has shrunk considerably. Whereas North Woods spanned centuries, his new novel confines itself to a single year, during which Miles, loving family man and lackadaisical Ph.D. candidate, plans to finally buckle down on that derelict degree of his and reassert his worth to one and all! At least, that’s the idea. But plans don’t stand much of a chance when there are eccentric neighbors to befriend and mysterious local legends to investigate.
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast, by Pamela Colloff (July 14)
This is the first book from Colloff, a veteran investigative journalist for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. She has won multiple National Magazine Awards for stories focused on miscarriages of justice – such as her 2019 piece about Paul Skalnik, a grifter, fabulist, sexual predator and snitch, whose fabrications can be linked to dozens of wrongful convictions in Florida, including some sending the innocent to death row. Here Colloff expands upon that investigation, which gets a lot more room to breathe in the transition from magazine article to full-length book. What emerges in this disturbing account is a portrait of one man’s callous cruelty, and the law enforcers who had no problem tolerating a deal with the devil, provided it kept juicing the conviction rate.
Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich (July 14)
Though it’s his fiction we’re discussing here, it’s important to note Rich’s reporting has earned plaudits, too, as well as a few film adaptations. No matter the medium, climate change is usually on his mind, as well as the blunt, rather bleak, prognosis he offered on Fresh Air in 2019: “There’s a huge range of outcomes … ranging from the not very good to the apocalyptic.” Which is to say I’m surprised to find myself describing his newest response to global catastrophe as a rollicking good time – and not just because I’ve never said those words, in that order, in my life. This spry, funny caper features a freelance environmental reporter who inadvertently breaks bad, careening under the influence of lust and a light wallet toward the novel’s big centerpiece: the planned heist of a massive data center.
Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate, by Roopika Risam (July 14)
And now, for another book centered on data – albeit from a rather different angle. This illuminating history from Risam, a Dartmouth professor, traces the practice of collecting information – and the power conferred by possessing it – from the bones that were humans’ first archives, to the omnipresent systems that shape (or outright determine) life today. As Risam asks, “What has it meant – and what will it mean – when records that once served only to help us remember, come to rule?” A pressing question (see: those data centers), which you’re probably better served trying to answer with the help of Risam than, say, Alexa or Claude.
It Will Come Back to You: Stories, by Sigrid Nuñez (July 14)
For someone with nine novels to her name, Nuñez got a later start than you might expect, having published her first book when she was already in her mid-40s. More than three decades later, now a spry 75 years old, the National Book Award winner has gotten around to publishing her first collection of short stories. The 13 stories here have been culled from across her career, but each one resonates clearly with the warm timbre of her voice: simple, unadorned prose and mundane setups, from which she consistently manages to tease out glimpses of truth, elusive and profound.
They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy, by Lauren Collins (July 14)
The only coup d’etat to succeed on U.S. soil is, at most, a distant historical afterthought these days. To be honest, I can’t recall reading a single textbook entry that even remarked on the 1898 race massacre in Wilmington, N.C., an action led by white supremacists that left many (historian estimates say up to 300) Black Wilmingtonians dead and permanently scarred a community newly aware of its simmering animus and vulnerability to violent overthrow. So I’m grateful for Collins’ new chronicle of the infamous event, which fills in some serious gaps in the American collective memory and explains how its perpetrators cultivated the disorienting silence that persists in the historical record today.
Yellow Pine, by Claire Vaye Watkins (July 21)
I don’t think I’ve ever actually laid eyes on the Mojave Desert but after reading Watkins’ latest novel, it feels like I can picture it more vividly than some streets I’ve actually lived on. No, it’s “not a beginner’s wilderness,” as Watkins concedes in Yellow Pine, but this landscape so redolent of death is also deceptively robust with life, if only you’re patient enough to find it. Too bad, then, that it’s also on fire. And choked by drought, irradiated by military test sites and soon to be sacrificed to a massive new solar array named, inexplicably, Yellow Pine. But those aren’t the only complications confronting the book’s main character, Rose, whose aspirations of becoming a kind of climate hermit warp a bit under the pressure of a rekindled love and the pendulum swing of rage and despair at the state of the world.
Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead (July 21)
Ray Carney is back, for what regrettably appears to be the last time. The lifelong Harlemite, hard-luck furniture dealer and ambivalent crook starred previously in Harlem Shuffle and its sequel, Crook Manifesto. His perspective is our window on the changing eras of the historically Black neighborhood, from the mid-1950s on. In this, the final installment in Whitehead’s brisk, exceedingly entertaining Harlem Trilogy, readers catch up with Carney around the start of the 1980s, following him deeply into Reagan’s decade. The novel also represents the end of an era for Whitehead, whose attention has been exclusively occupied with these characters since he won Pulitzer Prizes for consecutive novels, The Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys.
Beginning Middle End, by Valeria Luiselli (July 28)
The gifted young Mexican writer returns this month with her fourth novel, the second she has written in English and her first since Lost Children Archive launched to widespread plaudits more than seven years ago. Her new book, like her previous one, also concerns the travels of a small family – only this time, the road leads not through the American Southwest but Sicily. And the history sought by its mother-daughter main characters is not a record of bureaucratic cruelty but something much more intimately personal: the links shaped and tested by generations of shared heritage and experience.
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