Cultural missteps while traveling are rarely malicious; they’re almost always a simple lack of awareness about local norms that differ from home. A little research before visiting a new culture goes a long way toward showing genuine respect and avoiding the kind of unintentional offense that can sour an interaction for both you and the…
Not everyone has the luxury of long, sprawling holidays. For most of us, travel comes in short bursts — a long weekend, a few days squeezed between commitments, a quick getaway that has to count. There’s a temptation to feel that short trips are somehow lesser, that you can’t really experience a place in just…
For years I was a chronic overpacker. Every trip began with a bulging bag stuffed with things I was sure I’d need, and ended with me hauling that bag through stations and up stairs, having worn maybe half of what I brought. The turning point came on a trip where I lugged an enormous suitcase…
There are two ways to visit a place. You can move through it as a tourist — hitting the famous sights, eating where the crowds eat, staying in the areas built for visitors, and leaving with the same photos everyone else takes. Or you can experience it more like someone who lives there, getting under…
There’s a particular kind of misery that comes from a badly planned trip. The frantic mornings, the missed connections, the arguments over what to do next, the growing sense that the holiday is happening to you rather than being enjoyed by you. I’ve had those trips, and I’ve had the other kind — the ones…
Not every destination makes sense for a first solo trip, and that’s not a knock against the more challenging ones — it’s just sequencing. A destination that would be a fantastic tenth solo trip can be an overwhelming first one, and choosing well for a first attempt makes a bigger difference to how the whole…
Nobody puts “learned to eat at a restaurant by myself without feeling self-conscious” on a list of travel goals, but ask experienced solo travelers what they actually got out of years of traveling alone, and skills like this come up constantly. Solo travel has a way of teaching things that have nothing to do with…
Ask around before a first solo trip, and you’ll get no shortage of warnings — some useful, many wildly overblown, and a few that have almost nothing to do with actual risk. Solo travel safety deserves real attention, but a lot of the advice circulating tends to focus on dramatic, unlikely scenarios while glossing over…
The hardest part of a first solo trip usually isn’t the trip itself — it’s getting past the planning stage without talking yourself out of it. Solo travel has a reputation for being complicated or intimidating that doesn’t really match the reality once you’re in it, but the planning phase is where a lot of…