Get to Know a City by Walking It The best way to learn a city, see its inhabitants, and begin to understand a place is by walking it. Catching a cab, taking a bus, hopping on a subway are all perfectly viable means to get a traveler from one point to another, but the dusty…
Category: Traveling while Bashful
How to get around even if you are a wallflower
Should You Just Stay Home?
What to Do When Feeling Threatened by World Events On days when the news seems to be reporting that the world is crumbling, that our own personal peacefulness could possibly be at risk, when certain acts of violence, random or planned, shock more than others, staying in place may look more comforting. I’ll just sit…
Are You Too Scared to Take a Subway?
Travel like You Live There Subway systems can be intimidating, especially if you are navigating in a new city while using a different language—one in which you are not fluent. All sorts of fears surface—will I be robbed, pushed on the tracks, doomed to riding in circles because I don’t know where to get…
Liquid Courage
If a timid traveler needs just one book to catapult from a shelf, hit her on the head, and thrust itself into her backpack, it’s Lidia Yuknavitch’s Chronology of Water (Hawthorne Books 2010). Take the travel guides, yes, but bring along a work that will get you on the plane, get you to the Via…
Reading Without Reservations
I pick up Alice Steinbach’s Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman (Random House, 2000) at North Salem, N.Y.’s Ruth Keeler Memorial Library book sale, so I don’t have a lot of money invested in it. The first 20 pages or so really annoy so that I wonder whether I should stick with it,…
“I Can’t Walk into a Bar Alone”
So said a divorced mom of two to me about going through life a bit solo right now. I am always surprised when otherwise outgoing people suddenly become needy and clingy when confronted by an adventure that they have to undertake alone. Just this week, a certain senior adventurer in my life expressed doubts about…
Getting Out of the House and Staying Put
I travel because I want to try out different lives. Could I remember the names of all the trees and remedies to become a shaman? Would throwing my slop into the streets of medieval Rouen be too much for me? Could I ease into a laid-back work ethic as a resident of Rome? Would I…
Getting Going
I drove solo six or so hours to my high school reunion last summer and was surprised when I got there when one of my classmates said, “I would never have made that drive alone.” I remember thinking, Why not? I had first traveled solo for a vacation more than 20 years ago. I gave…