The passport sat in my drawer for three years before I used it properly.
Not for a quick hop to New Zealand to see my sister, but for the kind of trip I’d been talking about since my daughters left home. Rome. Just me, a carry-on bag, and seven days of not checking if anyone else wanted coffee before I made mine.
I booked the flight at 2am after a shift where I’d held the hand of a woman my age as she listed all the places she’d never seen. Her husband hadn’t liked flying. Then he’d gotten sick. Then it was too late. I came home, opened my laptop, and bought a ticket before I could think of a reason not to.
The waiting room of my own life
For forty years, I perfected the art of waiting. Waiting for my husband to retire so we could travel together. Waiting for the right friend to be free at the right time with the right budget. Waiting for someone to say “yes, let’s do that trip to Vietnam you keep mentioning.”
My divorce at 36 should have taught me something about waiting for other people to be ready for the life you want. But old habits run deep. I just shifted from waiting for a husband to waiting for anyone else who might want to see the Northern Lights or walk the Camino or spend two weeks in Japan eating everything in sight.
The thing about working shifts for 44 years is you get good at accommodating everyone else’s schedule. I became an expert at being flexible, available, ready to adjust my plans to fit around others. It’s useful when you’re raising daughters alone. Less useful when you’re 60 and still eating dinner at times that suit everyone except you.
When brave has nothing to do with it
People keep calling me brave for traveling alone. As if booking a flight to Barcelona requires the same courage as running into a burning building. I’m not brave. I’m just done waiting.
Brave would have been going at 40 when the fear was fresh and the voice in my head still insisted nice women didn’t eat alone in restaurants. By 60, that voice had been worn down by too many Friday nights scrolling through travel blogs while waiting for friends to commit to dates that never materialized.
The first solo trip wasn’t about courage. It was about math. I was 61. If I was lucky, I had maybe fifteen good travel years left. Fifteen years of knees that could handle cobblestones and energy that could survive a red-eye flight. The calculation was simple: wait for company and maybe see five places, or go alone and see thirty.
I chose thirty.
The truth about eating alone
Here’s what nobody tells you about traveling solo in your 60s: restaurant staff are extraordinarily kind to older women eating alone.
In Paris, I got the table by the window without asking. In Tokyo, the chef at a tiny ramen place taught me how to order in broken Japanese. In Lisbon, the waiter brought me a free glass of port because I reminded him of his aunt.
The first dinner alone felt like wearing a sign that said “nobody loves me enough to be here.” By the third night, it felt like freedom. I ordered what I wanted, ate at my pace, left when I was ready. No negotiating restaurants, no splitting bills, no pretending I wasn’t still hungry because everyone else was done.
There’s something about being 63 that makes you immune to the sideways glances that might have crushed you at 35. When you’ve worked night shifts in aged care, held people as they died, raised daughters through their teenage years solo, a raised eyebrow from a couple at the next table doesn’t even register.
What changed when I stopped waiting
My first solo trip was supposed to be two weeks in Italy. It turned into six weeks across four countries because nobody was waiting for me to come home. My daughters were grown, my grandchildren had their routines, my two work days a week could be rescheduled.
The ocean was still there for my morning swims when I got back. But I was different. Not transformed, nothing that dramatic. Just finally living in my own life instead of the waiting room of it.
I started booking trips the way other people book dentist appointments. Regularly, without drama, because they needed doing. Iceland in March. Portugal in September. A month in Thailand when my grandson asked why Grandma was always looking at pictures of other places on her phone.
Each trip taught me something I should have known decades earlier. That I’m excellent company for myself. That I can navigate Tokyo’s subway system despite not reading a word of Japanese. That loneliness and being alone are completely different things, and I’d spent too many years confusing them.
The ripple effect
Something shifts when you stop waiting for permission to live your life. I started saying no to lunch dates that didn’t work for me. I stopped pretending to like wine bars when I prefer a quiet coffee. I began swimming at dawn even when friends insisted evening was more social.
My daughters noticed first. “You’re different,” Megan said when I got back from walking parts of the Camino alone. “Like you finally arrived somewhere you’ve been trying to get to.”
She was right. I had arrived. Not at some destination, but at the understanding that my life wasn’t a dress rehearsal waiting for the real show to begin. This was it. Every postponed trip, every delayed dream, every adventure put on hold for a travel companion who never materialized was a choice to live less of my life.
Making peace with the solo journey
Last month, I sat in a small café in Prague, watching the rain streak down windows that had seen centuries of solitary travelers. A woman about my age sat at the next table, guide book open, wedding ring catching the light. She kept checking her phone, and I recognized the look. Waiting for permission, for company, for someone to validate her desire to explore.
I almost said something. Almost told her what I’d learned about the difference between alone and incomplete. How one morning you wake up and realize your life is already full, just not in the way you’d planned. But she needed to find that path herself, the way I had.
This is what freedom looks like
Next month, I’m going to Morocco. The month after, maybe Scotland. I book flights the way I used to plan my shifts around everyone else’s needs, except now the only schedule that matters is mine.
Sometimes friends ask if I get lonely. I tell them loneliness was sitting in my living room at 58, travel blogs open on my laptop, waiting for someone else to be ready for the life I wanted. This isn’t loneliness. This is freedom.
At 63, I’ve finally learned that the only person I needed permission from was myself. And she’s been ready to go for years.
- I started travelling alone in my 60s not because I was brave — but because I finally stopped waiting for someone to come with me - April 12, 2026
- The slow fashion shift nobody warns you about in your 60s — why choosing quality over quantity becomes the most liberating decision you’ll make - April 12, 2026
- 7 small lifestyle shifts women make in their 60s that have nothing to do with slowing down — and everything to do with finally choosing themselves - April 11, 2026