William Whyte, the urbanist who spent more than sixteen years walking and studying the streets of New York, once said that though we may say we wish to get away from it all, in the end we gravitate to the lively spaces, the places where we can see one another. We go there willingly, “not to escape the city,” he said, “but to partake of it.”
I stuffed a hand into my pocket. The day was chilly, yet there seemed to be the faintest hint of warmth in the air, the promise of a new season. Some people are born knowing how to savor. Others learn. And they can pass it along, Bryant said, from generation to generation.
On West 4th Street sunlight spilled down the ivy on the trunk of an old, tilted tree. Sidewalk tables were being set with folded napkins, as sure a sign of spring as the appearance of crocuses and pine warblers. Men were pouring dirt into planters on the townhouse stoops. Birds made a happy racket in the bushes. And nearby, the tulips poked up in Abingdon Square.
Each day I perform complex choreography around people, dogs, garbage bags, cyclists going the wrong way, traffic signs with arrows that say ONLY, creaking as they swing in the wind. Sometimes I walk for blocks, even miles, without paying much attention. But then my gait slows. Something tugs at my arm and whispers, Look! Look. There are limestone angles above the doors of the Parish of the Guardian Angel. There’s a Banksy painted on Zabar’s. There are toy cardinals tied like red ribbons to tree branches on Bank Street.
And just like that, Manhattan has me again.
Tips and Tools for Going It Alone
The following is to help give you a sense of the world of resources out there. It’s hardly a comprehensive guide but rather, a departure point: ideas about meeting people on the road, tracking where you’re wandering, learning a language, booking a table, chilling out, staying safe, and, of course, giving back. Below are a number of apps and websites, as well as some general travel information. But apps, start-ups, even hotels, come and go, and country laws are evolving, so it’s possible that something here has changed by the time you read it. That said, when one app or start-up vanishes, another potentially helpful tool tends to appear in its place. For the most up-to-date information, join me at StephanieRosenbloom.com.
Stay
There’s no standard solo trip or lodging style: Some people want tree houses; others want luxury suites. There’s a good deal of information online for solo travelers looking for home swaps (HomeExchange is one of the world’s largest exchange sites) or budget places to stay (Couchsurfing is an established player; Tentrr offers campsites bookable online, while Hipcamp has sites with lodgings like tents and yurts), and of course there’s Airbnb. Pod hotels have reasonable rates, too, as do many ryokans, which offer both privacy and community.
For those looking for higher-end hotels, in Europe many have lodgings for solo travelers, including the places I stayed. Often called single rooms, they’re typically smaller than standard ones but are a way to check in to some of the nicest places for less. One thing to keep in mind: Hotels don’t always list their single rooms under the Rooms and Suites section of their websites. You may have to search on a particular date to see prices and availability.
Even if you choose not to stay in a “single” room, hotels that offer and advertise them—such as the Hôtel Parc Saint Séverin, which said on its website that its single rooms are “ideal for your solo stays in Paris,” or the Savoy, which described having rooms that are “perfect for the solo traveller”—send an important message: Solo travelers are welcome.
Play
Anywhere Travel Guide. You probably don’t want to carry a deck of cards with you when you’re walking around, but you can sift through these before you head out the door. The suggestions they offer—“Observe silence today . . . Notice how this changes your impression of the sounds that surround you” or “Eat something you haven’t tried before”—are a great way to start thinking differently about how you see, experience, and savor a place, even your own backyard.
Tokaido. This board game, by the Paris-based company Funforge (funforge.fr), puts you in the right state of mind for travel by making you think about what you see, eat, give, and encounter along the way. An app allows you to play solo, with up to four artificially intelligent travelers. It’s just the thing for long layovers.
Duolingo. This free website and app (duolingo.com) turns language learning into a game of multiple-choice questions, word-matching quizzes, and writing and speaking translation challenges. If you answer correctly, you proceed to the next level. It’s language learning you can do at home or on the fly—waiting in line at the grocery store, on an airplane, or during your lunch hour. The more you learn, the more virtual currency you receive, which you can use to unlock bonus lessons, like how to flirt in French. The quizzes are short and mildly addictive, which is just what you want when practicing a language. Courses are available in Spanish, German, Japanese, Hebrew, French, Turkish, Italian, and more. A better use of your time than Candy Crush Saga? Evet, as they say in Turkish.
BookCrossing.com. A terrific solitary activity: “Hide” a book in a park or a city street for someone to find and enjoy. Join BookCrossing (it’s free), which allows you to print a label, attach it to your book, register it, and track where it goes. “Think of it as a passport enabling your book to travel the world without getting lost,” the site says. Leave books around your hometown, or like bread crumbs in places you travel. Who knows, maybe you’ll find one someday—maybe one that I left for you. (If you’re drawn to the chance and sweetness of BookCrossing, you may also like Boom Boom! Cards, each of which instructs you to perform an act of kindness before passing the card on to someone else. Or consider MoreLoveLetters.com, which began with one woman leaving letters of encouragement to strangers around New York City. The website allows people to request letters, and volunteer to send notes to those who could use a little cheer.)
Walk
LiveTrekker, created in France, is a free app for flâneurs with type-A personalities. Go ahead and stroll wherever the day takes you, and LiveTrekker (livetrekker.com) will follow along in the background, logging how far you walk and drawing a red line up and down the streets and through the gardens and museums you visit, creating a detailed, zoomable map (a satellite view allows you to see landmarks like the Eiffel Tower). You don’t need to do a thing or be connected to wi-fi. Just hit start before you go, and the app takes care of the rest. At the end of the day you can see a beautiful map of exactly where you’ve been. You can even share it with all the people who wish you had invited them along.
Detour. This audio tour company (detour.com) offers affordable walking tours of cities including London, Paris, Rome, New York, New Orleans, Portland, and Savannah. In Paris, for instance, you can take a tour of Saint-Germain called “The Golden Age of African-American Writers” that follows the trail of Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Not into audio tours but still want some direction? You may want to look into self-guided walking tours from companies like Country Walkers, which include maps, itineraries, luggage transfers, breakfasts, and some other meals.
Google Maps. When you’re someplace unfamiliar and want to find a good place to eat, touch this app’s “Explore” icon, where you can choose from categories like “lunch,” “coffee,” “dinner,” “cheap eats,” and “vegetarian-friendly spots.” The map’s navigation and turn-by directions are on point, but there are also detailed off-line maps of many cities so you don’t have to run up your data bill each time you need directions.
Traveling abroad? You may also want to add the Google Translate app to your phone. It’s allowed me to converse with Japanese taxi drivers, read French museum signs, and order dinner in Italian. It can be used in a variety of ways. The method I turn to most often involves the camera icon. Just tap it and hold your phone over a menu to see a virtual-reality translation, or take a snapshot of whatever text you’re looking at and the app will translate it. You can get translations of words that yo
u speak, type, or draw on your smartphone screen with your finger. The app is also capable of translation while two people converse. All that, and it’s free.
Meet
In addition to striking up conversations on the fly, there are all sorts of ways to meet locals and fellow solo travelers. Some cities have free greeter programs, like Brisbane Greeters in Australia. The Global Greeter Network (globalgreeternetwork.info) includes cities like New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Naples, and Haifa.
Looking to tour with other solo travelers? Context Travel (contexttravel.com) offers private or group walking tours (for no more than seven people) in more than thirty cities around the world, led by scholars with advanced degrees. Overseas Adventure Travel (oattravel.com) caters to travelers over fifty with small-group itineraries and has seen the number of solo travelers mushroom in recent years—it expects that soon about half of its travelers will be solos. In 2016, Intrepid Travel (intrepidtravel.com), with headquarters in Australia, began offering solo-only tours. Their popularity led the company to offer half a dozen solo-only departures to places like Bali and Morocco in 2018. Road Scholar (roadscholar.org) specializes in educational trips and offers solo travelers their own rooms for no supplemental charge.
If you don’t want to travel with others throughout your entire vacation, you may prefer day tours and experiences, which are increasingly popular among solo travelers. Websites that offer activities with locals or guides come and go. Toursbylocals.com has been around since 2008. MeetUp.com, which has been sold to WeWork (see here), has been organizing group activities for more than a decade and is a nice way to meet others who share your interests, be that going for a hike or visiting museums. Airbnb began offering what it calls Experiences (airbnb.com/experiences)—day tours and workshops led by locals in cities throughout the world (Havana, New Delhi, Tokyo, London), many for prices that won’t bust your wallet, and are available to anyone, not just travelers renting its homes. TripAdvisor has also gotten into the game, offering tours and activities bookable at tripadvisor.com/attractions (the company’s website has a solo travel forum, too).
Also check out robust solo travel communities like Solo Travel Society on Facebook and the related website, Solo Traveler, at solotravelerworld.com.
Eat
If you want to break up a solo vacation by sharing a meal (and perhaps learn a thing or two about local cuisine), you may want to consider wine appreciation classes and tastings, cooking classes—in Paris you can take them at schools from chefs like Alain Ducasse (ecolecuisine-alainducasse.com)—and gastronomic walking tours with stops at markets, bakeries, and pâtissieries. For instance, Paris by Mouth (parisbymouth.com) offers small-group food and wine tours like “Taste of the Marais” and “Taste of Saint-Germain.” If you prefer to explore markets on your own, the Marchés de Paris app (marchesdeparis.com/en) allows you to search the city for food, flower, flea, and bird markets. You can narrow your results by day of the week and market type (including whether it’s indoors or outdoors and has organic food) and see which fruits and vegetables are in season. Cost: $0.99.
Another way to find market tours and classes, or just someone with whom to share a meal, is through peer-to-peer apps and websites, which enable you to book meals with local hosts in a matter of minutes. Some hosts are even professional chefs. Feastly (eatfeastly.com), for instance, is entirely made up of them. EatWith (eatwith.com) offers meals in more than two hundred cities, including San Francisco, New York, Tel Aviv, Rome, and Barcelona. Withlocals (withlocals.com) focuses on food and cultural experiences in places like Asia (including Cambodia, Indonesia, and Vietnam), the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, England, Belgium, and Portugal. Other examples include Meal Sharing, VoulezVouzDîner, and BonAppetour. You may want to visit the social media pages and blogs of these companies of these companies as well, because they can be a source of inspiration and information about ways to meet people. Also, TripAdvisor features bookable “food tours” listings on its site.
As with other peer-sharing sites like Airbnb, you rely on user reviews and the host’s profile page to inform your selection. Some hosts cook for two or three people; others for half a dozen. So you may not be dining only with the chef, but perhaps his or her spouse, as well as other travelers or even locals in the mood for a home-cooked meal. Prices vary greatly, not just from city to city but within cities. You can find meals for $35 or for $135, depending on factors including the food being served, the location, and the chef’s experience.
As homey and genial as these sites look, remember that while some verify basic information (like names, social media profiles, addresses, and payment information), they generally do not run comprehensive background checks on the people whose homes you’re visiting. So read the reviews and any biographical information the hosts provide carefully. (Some may offer links to their culinary work or social networks.) You may also be able to message the chef or host before booking a meal to ask for more information and get a feel for him or her. Some sites, like Feastly, don’t just have shared meals at the cook’s home but also offer them at pop-up locations, farms, and other large venues.
Prefer a table for one? A booking app like TheFork (thefork.com, owned by TripAdvisor), can help make such a reservation in places throughout Europe (France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands) when you don’t speak the language and aren’t staying at a hotel where someone can book a table for you. You can also browse menus, photos, and reviews. Does TheFork have all the hottest restaurants? No. But as with popular U.S. booking apps like Resy or OpenTable (which has very few restaurants in places like Paris, Florence, and Istanbul), it has some good spots and it’s a breeze to use.
Chill
If you’re looking to meditate, practice being in the moment, or simply unwind when you’re on your own, these apps and websites are one way your smartphone may actually help.
Insight Timer. There are many fine meditation apps, but this one (insighttimer.com) is free, has thousands of guided meditations, and is customizable. You can set a timer for how long you want to meditate, add some bells at chosen intervals, ambient sound and music—or silence—and meditate on your own.
Calm. This app and website (calm.com) offer various guided meditations, but you may like Calm just for the free nature sounds and videos—beach waves, rain on leaves, a crackling fire—that beat the drone of white noise any day. When you’re on the road alone or working and need to drown out the masses, this is a good one to have in your arsenal.
Breathe 11:11. At 11:11 a.m. in your local time zone, this free app will chime and you’ll receive a notification on your phone that says “Breathe. Wish. Connect.” (Presumably along with others who have downloaded the app—you can see a heatmap of where in the world people are using it.) The idea is to encourage mindful breathing and positive thinking, to use the moment to take at least three slow, deep breaths. (If 11:11 a.m. isn’t convenient, you can set the chimes to go off at a different time. You can also change the notification to something more personal if you prefer.)
Productive. This app allows you to set reminders throughout the day, week, or month to do things like take a breath, write in your journal, get outside, even “talk to a stranger.” Suddenly a little bell and banner on your phone will remind you to breathe, stretch, or engage in whatever habits you’ve added from the app. You can also write in your own. In this way, even if you have only a minute to yourself, you can use it meaningfully. Users can schedule a few habits free of charge, but if you want to add others, and receive timed reminders and weekly stats about how you’re doing, you’ll have to upgrade to a subscription (about $4 a month; $10 for six months; $20 for a year). Productive is hardly the only game in town, so be sure to check out the competition, including apps like HabitMinder and Habitica (which turns establishing habits into a game by giving you rewards like virtual pets), before deciding.
Headspace. Andy Puddicombe’s soothing English accent and affable demeanor are
likely to make even the most reticent meditators give the practice a second try. Headspace (headspace.com) includes short sessions that make it easy to fit meditation into your schedule. There’s a ten-day free trial; after that, you pay by subscription type (about $13 a month; $72 a year; or $400 a lifetime).
Freedom. Hoping to get into a flow state? This program (free dom.to) will block websites and apps on your smartphones, tablets, and computers so you can stay focused (about $7 a month; $29 a year; $129 forever).
Coffitivity. Like Calm, this app and desktop tool (siwalik.in/coffitivityOffline) provides ambient noise—in this case, the sounds of a coffee shop—that its makers say will help boost your creativity. Whether or not that proves to be true, it’s another pleasing alternative to white noise. You can choose from free soundtracks like “morning murmur” and “university undertones,” or buy additional “premium” coffee shop ambiences such as “Brazil Bistro” and “Texas Teahouse.”
Pause. The makers of this seemingly simple app say it uses principles of Tai Chi to help you relax and focus your attention. Think of it as guided meditation through images instead of voice. Just place your finger on a small blob and slowly move it around the screen of your smartphone. Move gently, and the blob grows while your ears are bathed with ambient sound, birdsong, and the sound of breaking waves. Move too quickly and the app (ustwo.com/work/pause) tells you to slow down. I was skeptical, but it’s one of the few digital tools that in as little as a minute successfully forces me to, well, pause (about $2).
ASMR videos. ASMR stands for something that sounds scientific—Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. For the uninitiated, it’s a feeling of relaxation, often described as tingles, that some people get when they hear soft sounds like whispers and gentle tapping, or see slow or repetitive movements like fluttering hands. Sometimes these videos take the form of role plays in which the viewer receives a virtual shoulder massage or is welcomed to a luxury hotel. There are people all over the world who make free YouTube videos of these prompts designed to help others relax. Many people simply use the videos as sleep aids. Just Google ASMR, choose the “videos” category, and you’ll be on your way. You can also watch and listen in other languages, like French (try the Made in France ASMR and Paris ASMR YouTube channels).
Alone Time Page 18