If you’ve been around for awhile, you’ve probably seen my neverending posts about how much I love Copenhagen! I have talked about how it was my first “big” solo trip and how life changing it was for me…
But I’ve never shared how I started solo traveling in the first place. My trip to Copenhagen was in 2018, but my first experience traveling by myself was actually five years earlier.
Let’s rewind, shall we?
I believe that I have always been destined for solo travel, but it was never a conscious decision to travel the world alone. When I was very young I learned that my great-grandmother had traveled alone quite a bit. When I asked her why, she responded to my question with a question: Why shouldn’t she? Her husband was gone, her kids were grown…why should she wait around for other people to do what she wanted to do?
That conversation was the driving force behind getting my airplane tattoo before my trip to Copenhagen. (You can read more about that conversation and the decision to get my airplane on a lunch break here.)
While that conversation definitely planted the solo travel seed in my mind at an early age, I think I always assumed that my solo traveling wouldn’t begin for many, many decades, much like my great-grandmother’s solo adventures didn’t begin until she was in her 50s.
The summer of 2013 I was training for Nationals for dance, which were being held in Anaheim California the week of July 4. While I had been to California a few years earlier with my grandmother, my mom had never been and we were excited to explore Disneyland together once I was done competing.
Unfortunately that excitement was overshadowed by my grandmother’s quick decline. She had been diagnosed with lung cancer less than a year before and by the end of May we knew she wouldn’t make it through the summer. She passed away on June 8.
That should have been the worst moment of my summer, and I fully expected it to be. Her funeral was held a few days later and the night of the funeral I left to go to New Jersey with my boyfriend at the time because he had bought me tickets to see Wicked on Broadway. I told my mom that I would stay home to be with her, I even tried insisting that I shouldn’t be going to New Jersey, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She knew that I had always wanted to see Wicked and she didn’t want me to give that up just to stay with her when she had friends to support her while I was gone.
Six days after my grandmother’s death I was fast asleep in my boyfriend’s parents’ basement when my phone started ringing shortly after 2AM.
Nothing good ever happens after 2AM…
The phone number was from my hometown, but it wasn’t a number I recognized so I didn’t answer it. I had a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach as I watched the phone ring, but I figured if it was important the person would leave a message.
When the notification popped up that I had a voicemail, intense dread washed over me.
That phone call was from a detective with the Worcester Police Department, calling me to tell me that my mother had been murdered that night. Her boyfriend had been distraught over the loss of my grandmother, gotten drunk, and shot her. He then almost immediately committed suicide when he realized what he had done.
That selfish decision to take my mother’s life left me completely alone in the world.
18 days later, I arrived at Logan Airport and braced myself for my flight to California. I boarded the plane, sat in my seat, and did everything I could to avoid looking at the empty seat next to me where my mom should have been sitting, but would never sit again.
When I arrived in Anaheim my boyfriend, who was also a dancer, offered to stay in my hotel room with me. I quickly said no, ready to peel off the bandaid and embrace my new life. This was my reality now. I had no other immediate family and needed to get used to empty hotel rooms and strangers in the seats next to me on planes, trains, and automobiles.
(Sorry, my bad habit is that I need to break up heavy conversations with a joke, even if it’s a bad one.)
I don’t think I have ever put this story out to the Vagarious Wanderer community before, at least not in this much detail, but I think it is time. The start of my solo travel journey may not be a happy one. It wasn’t a decision to study abroad, which I never had a chance to do thanks to the events that transpired the summer of 2013. It wasn’t because my fierce independence drove me to do it. It wasn’t because I had a burning desire to go to a specific place and no one would make the time to go with me. My flight was booked, my mom was killed, but that flight was still going to take off as scheduled. While no one would have faulted me for deciding to not go to Nationals, it just was not something I ever saw as an option.
So why am I sharing this part of my life with all of you now?
I feel like I have been living a bit of a lie. My solo travels look great on Instagram, but sometimes I think it looks like I just got up and decided one day that I was going to travel solo, got on the next plane, and the rest is history.
I didn’t choose to be solo on that first flight, someone else made that choice for me.
But I also want to point out that I didn’t just fly across the world alone and explore a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language. I flew across the country and ended up in a destination where all my closest dance friends were. Yes, I had my own hotel room and I did explore on my own a bit, but it wasn’t as extreme as the stories of some other women I know.
Solo travel is whatever you want it to be. If you’re not ready to just jump into a month-long backpacking trip across Southeast Asia, that’s okay! I encourage you to ease yourself into it. Start by taking yourself out to dinner a few times and work your way up to a solo weekend trip. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will your journey to becoming a solo female traveler.