My friend Hanna couldn’t go with me.
She was my premier travel buddy — a measured quantity. We met and became friends during a study-abroad semester in London, sleeping in twin beds three feet apart, traipsing around Europe on a low budget with few concrete plans. We know that halfway through any trip she’ll have what we call a “bitch fit,” because maybe it’s been too long since she ate and maybe she’s starting to get uncomfortable with being away from home. I’ll always try to put a positive spin on the situation, eagerly trying to convince us both that someday it will just be a memory, and we’ll laugh when we remember. I’m usually right about that.
It was now a year after our college graduation, and I wanted to use up the PTO I’d earned at my corporate job, and I wanted to go to Spain. I’d been a Spanish major, and I’d never been to Spain, and plane tickets in October were cheap. But Hanna couldn’t go.
So I started to tease out the idea of going alone.
When I told my parents, they didn’t love it. They’ve never been out of the country before, and despite me being 23 years old at the time, it was hard for them to imagine me being completely, utterly alone in another country. I, on the other hand, knew I would be fine — I knew Spanish. I knew Spain top-to-bottom, from my college classes. I knew Europe, thanks to several other trips in the previous few years. I wasn’t worried about myself at all from a safety perspective.
No, my hesitation stemmed from the fact that I would be alone socially. No one to go to museums with, get dinner and drinks with, meet random strangers and go dancing with, get lost in the streets and find my way home with. It would only be me. Would I be lonely? Would I keep to myself, too shy to step out of my comfort zone? I sure hoped not, but I’d never done anything like this before, so I couldn’t be certain.
I decided that, despite the uncertainty, I would do it anyway. If nothing else, I’d get a good story out of it — right?
I bought a nice journal at Barnes and Noble, so I could at least have a record of the entire experience, regardless of how it turned out. And with that journal, tucked away into the hiking backpack I was using as my only luggage for the trip, I boarded the plane from Chicago to Madrid.
Want to know what happened next? Here’s what happened when I decided to travel solo.
-Cathy
Originally Published on June 10, 2017.
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