About This Site — And the Person Behind It
A restaurant greeter once asked me if I was alone. I thought about it for a moment, looked him in the eye, and said: “No. Just by myself.”
His puzzled expression was entirely understandable. But in that small exchange was the whole philosophy behind everything you’ll find on this site. Alone suggests something missing. By myself suggests something chosen. That distinction — quiet, personal, and harder to explain than it sounds — took me years to fully own. Now it’s the thing I most want to share.
Who I Am
I’m a solo traveller, based in Scotland, who came late to travelling alone and has never looked back. I’ve done the long-haul flights and the short city breaks, the warm coastal cities and the atmospheric cobbled streets, the beach mornings and the market lunches and the dinners for one that stopped feeling awkward somewhere around the third or fourth time.
I’ve blobbed on my back in warm sea water and whispered “wish I was back at the office right now” just to hear myself laugh. I’ve navigated foreign train stations and friendly pharmacists and apartment rentals and street food stalls where pointing hopefully at someone else’s bowl turned out to be the best decision of the day. I’ve felt the particular joy of waking up in a room that is entirely mine and asking, with genuine curiosity, “what do I want to do today?”
I’ve also felt the wobble. The quiet bedroom the night before departure. The empty suitcase at midnight. The moment in a foreign street when the map stops making sense and the confidence temporarily follows suit. I know that feeling too. It’s part of the story, not a reason to stay home.
Why I Built This Site
Because the travel content I needed when I started didn’t quite exist. Not in the voice I needed it. There was plenty of content for twenty-somethings with backpacks and boundless energy. Plenty for couples planning romantic getaways. Plenty of glossy inspiration that looked beautiful and felt completely disconnected from the reality of actually getting yourself out of the door after fifty.
What I wanted was someone who understood that the battle isn’t finding the hotel. It’s leaving the house. Someone who could talk about solo travel with warmth and humour and hard-won honesty, without being preachy about it. Someone who’d been there, made a few of the classic errors, learned what actually matters, and was willing to say it plainly.
I couldn’t find that site. So I built it.
What You’ll Find Here
This site is built around four things I genuinely care about and have lived experience of:
The mindset of solo travel. The real conversations about fear, freedom, confidence, and what it actually feels like to book a table for one and mean it. No slogans. No toxic positivity. Just honest reflection from someone who’s been in the empty-suitcase-at-midnight moment and gone anyway.
Destinations that work for solo travellers. Places I know, have visited, and can speak about with the kind of detail that only comes from actually being there. Da Nang at 6am. Lisbon with a custard tart and nowhere to be. Edinburgh when you need a city that lets you arrive complicated.
Practical tools and preparation. Packing, planning, safety, the things worth spending money on and the things that aren’t. Including the medical alert card I carry everywhere and the carry-on bag I’ve had for twenty years that has been on every adventure without complaint.
The smarter use of modern tools. Including how to use AI to plan a day that actually fits your life rather than an optimistic version of it, and when to ignore the algorithm entirely and ask the pharmacist instead.
Who This Site Is For
Honestly? It’s for anyone who has ever looked at a saved travel folder that keeps growing while the actual trip keeps not happening. Anyone who has been told they’re “brave” for wanting to travel alone and found that word more unsettling than encouraging. Anyone who has wondered whether “at our age” is a reason or an excuse.
It is particularly for women over fifty who are done waiting for the right companion, the right moment, the right set of stars to align before they give themselves permission to go. You have good judgement. You have life experience. You have already solved harder problems than a train ticket. You are not fragile. You are, in fact, extremely well equipped for this — you just might not have been told that clearly enough yet.
Consider this that conversation.
A Note on How This Site Works
Everything here is written from lived experience, genuine research, or honest opinion. Where I recommend a product, it’s because I use it or have tested it or genuinely believe it earns its place in a solo traveller’s life. Where I link to something, I’ll tell you if there’s an affiliate relationship involved — because you deserve to know, and because I’d rather have your trust than your click.
I use AI as a planning and research tool, the same way I’d use any good tool — to save time on the mechanics so the human stuff can be what it needs to be. The voice, the judgement, the stories, the opinions, the occasionally strong feelings about sore feet and late-night suitcase packing — those are entirely mine.
Finally
If you are standing at the beginning of this — the folder full of saved destinations, the flight you keep almost booking, the question you keep almost asking yourself — I am genuinely glad you found this place.
You are not alone in any of it. You are just, perhaps, not quite by yourself yet.
Let’s change that.