The Virtues of Solo Travel

By: Lucas R. Watson, Layout Editor

Typically, when people travel, they travel with friends, family or partners. They share the experiences with someone else, and they embrace unique situations with someone else. Solo travel is an expression of ultimate freedom. My experiences largely stem from my solo travel experience in England during the autumn of 2024 while I studied abroad.

When traveling alone, you are responsible to yourself only, which also means you are liable for yourself only, so you must keep yourself in check when doing any number of things. A lot of this will come up again as I discuss it further.

You learn to trust yourself more; you may find yourself unable to do x, y or z in your daily life, but when you travel alone, you manage to do all of these things, like handling a complex train transfer, making it to a certain destination in time or making reservations. These small things do add up and lead you to trust yourself further; they give you experience with the minute factors of traveling and give you more confidence as you begin to trust yourself. One of my experiences with this stems from traveling to Portsmouth. I had at first overestimated how early I needed to be at the train station, as I was taking the first train of the day, so I had waited outside of London Waterloo train station at o-dark-thirty. It was a small thing, a mistake to be true, but I wasn’t sure if I would make the train in time. With this experience came more trust in myself and my abilities to navigate, that I’d make the train regardless of the time the station opened, and that I needn’t treat the train station like an airport. It led me to trust my gut further.

There is a sense of self-discovery and inner peace that you find when you travel alone. You may end up going somewhere serene or striking and find yourself thinking about your position in life at that time. You can become deeply introspective when you’re alone with your thoughts and can experience incredible things all alone. When you don’t have anyone to share your current emotions with, you tend to keep them to yourself and in turn, you learn more about how you can handle your own emotions and your own reactions to things. But what you end up doing, or at least what I did here and there, is thinking about yourself, where you are in life and where you want to end up.

It is the ultimate form of freedom; while you are liable for yourself and responsible for only yourself, you’re also free from others. You can take the path you wish to; take the detour to see a cool little site that others may not want to see. You get to live by your own schedule, and for some, it works so, so well, and for others, not so well. Different people work differently. You can do what you wish, when you wish.

Meeting strangers and learning how to interact with people you’ve never met before and will likely never meet ever again affords you the opportunity to build on your social skills. Meeting people you might not normally interact with will most likely lead you to become more open-minded and lead to decreased social anxiety or social awkwardness for yourself in the future.

For me, I was able to experience places that I would not have otherwise, like walking through a windstorm at Southend-on-Sea, 1.3 miles out to sea down the pier in the Thames Estuary, with 30-mile-an-hour winds and 50-mile-an-hour gusts. It’s the only place I bought a hat because I was so miserable. But I did it regardless. If I had taken someone with me, there’s no way that they would have agreed to taking an old train out to the end of a windswept pier and fighting through insane winds to see a neat tourist attraction.

By all means, solo travel is not for everyone and it truly doesn’t fit most people; it can be incredibly stressful if things go awry or if things fall through the cracks. If you do want to travel alone, be aware of your surroundings and have a general plan in mind and a general idea of where you’re going – just stay informed.

But if you would still want to travel alone, I highly recommend it. You’ll grow in ways you wouldn’t expect yourself to, and you’ll learn more about yourself than you will in nearly any other activity. If you want to do it, go ahead and see where the path takes you.