Thoughts from a week of solo traveling

I was traveling around Europe for a week on my own. I went to Krakow, Bratislava, Vienna, Salzburg, Innsbruck, and St. Anton Arlberg.

Pros

The time away from others

We spend big chunks of our lives frequently surrounded by others. While having companions, people to talk and have fun with, is definitely awesome for many reasons, it leads to not as much time with your own thoughts.

For someone like myself, who’s not so good at making the time to catch up on what’s been happening and how I’ve been thinking/feeling about it, having time not inundated by other people that I know was well-needed and refreshing.

It gave my mind more time and space to wander as opposed to attending to those around me. This wandering led to thinking back on recent experiences I have had (like specific events and travels from the last year), to what’s currently going on in my life (friends, family, interests, graduating college), and towards future explorations, interests and passions (reading a book on Kissinger, thinking about the environmental conference I attended, thinking what I want to learn next).

Traveling (or being) alone, there’s way more unstructured time for things like this, especially for someone like me that feels like I constantly need to be busy and doesn’t get as much of this time as needed normally.

I wouldn’t it’s something you need absence of others to get, nor that you’ll get it automatically from traveling alone.

You can create the mental space for yourself anytime, which you could force daily in the midst of normal life, or you could even take that mental time when you’re with your friends by taking attention away from the activity.

On the other side, I could have made more friends and started more conversations while I was traveling, and there were definitely opportunities to do so. If I had, I could have continued to avoid this time.

Either way, using travel as a buffer and medium for that has been nice.

Seeing where it goes

In turn with the space, I got to see where my mind went. What it attended to, what had been in my subconscious and what the things were I most needed to think about.

I think it helped unlock some important doors for me as I have my own goals for this traveling experience to help myself moving forward.

Doing whatever I want

By being alone, I have not had to cater to anyone else’s interests. I have been able to pick the locations that I most want to check out, eat wherever I would like, and be entirely on my own schedule.

I’ve had solid and shitty travel companions in the past, but there’s no question that there’s something nice about being able to do literally whatever I want, whenever. Especially in a big, new, exciting city that I have limited time to explore. It led to less anxiety on those things and I was able to do see lots of awesome things that I’m not sure others would have always wanted to do.

I was in Katowice, Poland and knew I had to be in Prague about a week later. In between, I could have done literally anything in the entire world. That felt empowering.

Cons

Experiencing things alone

As much as got to explore and have fun, there’s something inherently more fun when you are experiencing something with someone else (granted they don’t suck).

So, there were things I saw or did that I’ll always remember, but I don’t have others to share those experiences and memories with.

Not having someone to watch my back

Kind of on the same grain, when traveling alone there’s not someone to watch my back. I didn’t really have any issues through the week, but if I had, I could have been super screwed. I was thinking about what would have happened if my phone broke/got stolen/got lost, for example. It was my navigation, my means of communication, figuring out where to go, what to eat and how to call Ubers (which awesomely existed in most of the cities I was in). Without it, I would have figured it out, but it would have seriously slowed me down.

I also didn’t do certain things because I didn’t have that someone to watch my back or to go experience something with. I had no interest in going alone to a club in Vienna, for example, despite how fun it would have been if I had been with friends. I didn’t really want this first leg to be for partying, so definitely don’t mind, but as I’m thinking back, there are just a handful of things I didn’t do since I was solo.

Other thoughts

Planning on the go was a bit stressful

I didn’t make any plans for what I was going to do before I got to Europe. It ended up being fine, for sure, and it gave me more flexibility, but what sucked was that I had to take time out of my travels to plan them. I had to book Airbnbs, trains, buses, and figure out what I wanted to do in each place.

Some people like this ambiguity and I think in other situations I would have, but given that I was locationally confined in some ways and that I had a larger bag than I would have liked, I think I could have planned my week pretty much entirely before I had gotten to Europe. And, for me, the not knowing where I’d stay, what I’d do, etc. is a bit stressful instead of fun.

Was all fine, but probably would have planned a bit more before I got here.

There’s so much to explore

I talk about it in some of my city posts, but there’s just so much out there to explore. I feel lucky to be able to have this experience and try to capture and begin to understand and explore the tiny fraction that I am.

Europe has so much history and endless area for fun and exploration. It was a exploratory, constant moving, new things, good food and cool places kind of week, and the flexibility of being alone along with the mental space were much needed.

I was glad to meet up with my mom in Prague when I did, though.