The savvy over 50 traveler and how to create fantastic solo trips

How can you become the savvy over 50 traveler?

Group trips or solo trips?

Solo tips with group activities?

How can you make your solo trips and your group trips more exciting?

Forget ticking boxes! It’s so stressful to try and fulfil other people’s travel list and to see as much as you can in a few hours.

Slow travel is the best way to enjoy your travels.

Stay longer in a place. Even better: Choose a base city or village and go on day trips.

A trip is an extension of your daily lifestyle. Take your hobbies, join workshops, go on teaching trips or mix it all up.

Your vacation should be something that you enjoy. It’s a special time for you to enjoy as you wish.

Are you a loner traveler or do you prefer to meet people when you travel?

Change how you go places and become a curious and more active traveler.

Take your hobby with you or plan a trip around your hobby.

Plan to join workshops and classes.

Join short tours, they are a fun way to meet other travelers and get local information.

If you are a solo traveler, it doesn’t mean you have to be alone all the time.

I love to photograph and sketch and luckily these are two things that are easy to travel with.

I join photo walks, urban sketching groups, cooking classes and more, but I also go off on my own. I love meeting with other people so the group activities are very helpful to me.

woman and dog for traveler article — illustration by Marguerite Beaty

Drawing

I have always liked to sketch but I don’t draw well and eventually stopped because I thought it was just too difficult. A few years ago I became interested in drawing again. It made my solo travel so much more interesting! I had a challenge and a new hobby.

I started to make simple line sketches of something I had seen during the day. I drew at night when I got back to my hotel room. It gave me something to do and it made me think about my day.

I took a gap year in 2016 and at the end of the trip I had a quirky visual traveler journal. I posted them on my Facebook private page and people were very entertained with my drawings.

This old/new interest became a hobby and I looked for drawing classes and painting classes whenever I traveled and at home. This opened a whole new world for me and traveling became more about creating experiences. Drawing and photography have become a big part of all my plans now.

This has seeped into my daily life at home and so I my life has changed completely. I live with tons of images floating in my head and some actually make it to paper.

Walking Helps my Artistic Inspiration

I will go for long walks or a lovely drive with a tiny sketch book and my mobile to photograph. I take notes of places that I want to come back to paint. Sometimes I’ll set up somewhere to paint and I finish my art later on in the evening (at home or a hotel if I am traveling). I will jot down my ideas because I get so many of them while I walk.

On Being on One’s Own

The evening is the most difficult part of living alone… For me. I used to get restless and or bored. There were times that I would go out but I mostly did not have energy to entertain myself in public. I felt it was a chore.

I love going out to restaurants and movies but there is only so much of that I can do!

I spoke to many women who live alone and asked them what they did when they felt alone and if they traveled on their own. Many of them chose not to travel because they didn’t feel safe and hated the idea of eating out alone.

A few women and men told me that they went back home (or to the hotel) early in the evening and didn’t go out because they didn’t want to feel alone.

I started to put all this information together and changed how I travel and my daily life at home. I have to say that I was lucky to find a few hobbies like painting and cooking because those are the things that I do during the evenings.

I look for workshops in the evenings and if I am doing an online class I do that later in the day.