When I was 20 and spring break arrived, most of my classmates threw swimsuits in their suitcases. I carefully rolled wool sweaters, thermal leggings and a new waterproof coat inside packing cubes and fitted them tightly inside my lime-green hiking backpack. My friends headed off to beaches from Miami to Mexico with friends and family to enjoy a week of lazing in the sun. I took a bus to O’Hare International Airport and boarded a flight to cold, wet Scotland — alone. 

Despite the conventional wisdom that danger lurks around each corner for a woman unaccompanied, solo female travelers from Wisconsin and all over the world have decided to take their chances. They go in the hopes of finding confidence, adventure, and freedom from other people, expectations and their own fears. For many such women, the decision to take to road, sea or sky alone turns the role of travel in their lives from hobby to identity. 

It was this trip to Scotland that allowed me to name myself a member of the club of solo female travelers. The club may seem exclusive, but I am far from alone in desiring this kind of travel experience. Hostelworld, the largest online hostel-booking platform, reported a 45 percent increase in female solo bookings between 2015 and 2017. A quick Google search of the phrase brings up hundreds of blogs, destination lists and social media accounts. 

However, in the Midwest, nearly half of adults never move away from their hometowns and 64 percent never live outside their home state. Wisconsin in particular has the fifth highest percentage among all states of residents who were born and continue to reside here. Perhaps that’s why my family and friends were in such total disbelief that I went through with my plan to visit Scotland for no particular reason except that I wanted to go there.

Sweet freedom

Paige Strigel traveled by herself to Scotland in 2018. (Photo courtesy of Paige Strigel)

When my flight lands, I pass through customs before making a beeline to the express tram into the center of Edinburgh. There, I step through the white sliding doors and onto cobblestones, right in front of a kilted man playing the bagpipes. Despite my anxieties about following my poorly screenshotted map to a hostel somewhere in this city, I have to smile. Somehow, I made it across an ocean alone. 

After finally locating my hostel, I climb three flights of stairs over threadbare carpet, passing suits of armor and walls crowded with heavily framed artwork. Unlocking the door to my room, a mixed-gender dorm filled with half a dozen sets of bunk beds and lockers, I drop my bags on my bed. A massive bay window across the room looks right at the Edinburgh Castle itself. Standing there, I suddenly wonder, “What now?” 

Slowly, the answer dawns on me: whatever I want. 

This kind of freedom is a major reason solo female travel is appealing. 

“I think as women, we tend to be more accommodating. So when you go by yourself, you get to do exactly what you want to do,” says Mary Karsten, a Wisconsin native and solo female traveler. 

Karsten grew up in DeForest — a village hardly a 15-minute drive from downtown Madison — and remains there at age 50. Still, she caught the travel bug. When Karsten and her then-husband divorced five years ago, she took a hike. 

Literally.

“When I got divorced, I said, you know, what is it that I love to do? And I didn’t even really know. So I just started doing a whole bunch of different things,” Karsten says. She tried minimalism. Tried spending no money for a month. And then she found hiking.

Karsten began meeting with groups she found online through Facebook pages like Bold Betties, which has created a community for “wild women” interested in exploring the outdoors with other like-minded individuals. These group hiking trips allowed her to build confidence and develop basic outdoor skills. Still, something was missing.

“I had always wanted to take a solo trip, but it kind of scared the bejesus out of me,” Karsten says. After reading the book “You are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life,” by Jen Sincero, she followed the author’s advice and stopped waiting. Karsten put a date on the calendar, requested time off work and let her family know she was going to go solo. 

In Scotland, the freedom of being solo allows me to make plans on the fly. After a few days in Edinburgh, I’m itching for a change in scenery. I head north to hike the Highlands.

There, on the Isle of Skye, I find the earth covered in frost each morning despite it being nearly April. It crunches under my feet as I walk alongside the Fairy Pools, cascading basins of icy snowmelt that descend from the Cuillin mountain range. Before 8 a.m., there are no sounds but the gurgling and rush of water — exactly what I need after being in a tourist-filled city.

Emma Moll, a UW-Milwaukee graduate and current Madison resident, was in search of her own kind of freedom when she decided to become a solo traveler. She tried to take a trip with a friend just after college. After one sweltering, hours-long drive, one phone dropped in the ocean, and one surprise double Tinder date, she decided that solo travel might just suit her better. She took her first international solo trip to Ireland, but most recently she’s just returned from two weeks spent traveling by plane, train and bus between Iceland, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland. 

Megan Johnson, of Eau Claire, writes a blog about her travels, called “Red Around the World.” She seems surprised and confused by any suggestion that what she does might be remarkable or at the very least somewhat unusual. 

“Oh, I don’t think there was anything like too crazy in deciding to go by myself. I was like, ‘I just want to go, so … I am,’” she says with a laugh.

Under attack

Whatever our motivations for hitting the road on our own, it’s hard to ignore the elephant in the room.  

“They were not impressed,” Karsten says of her mother and aunts. Her relatives in particular pleaded with her not to take that first solo hiking trip, saying, “We want you to be safe…and we wish you were going with somebody else.”

Mary Karsten hiked part of the Appalachian Trail in December of 2018. (Photo courtesy of Karsten)

“My family thought I was going to get myself killed,” Moll says. 

Jenny White, who until recently was an operating room nurse in Madison, says her mom was far from supportive when she decided to go first to Israel and then Morocco on her own, meeting tour groups after landing in her destination country.

“My mom’s like, why are you gonna go gallivanting around the world in places where you shouldn’t be?” White says. Her words may not have stopped White from traveling, but they hit the mark.

It’s hardly a surprising or uncommon reaction. Headlines about women who are attacked and assaulted or killed are common, even when those women are not solo travelers. This past March, the New York Times documented horrific stories of solo female travelers who were kidnapped, assaulted, raped or murdered in the course of their travels, publishing a story called “Adventurous. Alone. Attacked.” These are extreme cases, no doubt. But the everyday threats that lead women to take precautionary measures in nearly any city seem to loom larger for women who have gone solo.

The realities of being a solo traveler hit me halfway through the Scotland trip with my first bad hostel experience. I begin to suspect I’ve made a mistake while getting my key from a sullen man in the decrepit front office. In the dorm room, a middle-aged man on the bed next to mine wakes up from a nap as I lock up my belongings. He begins to question me persistently. Where am I from? Why am I here? What are my plans? And was I alone? I feel his eyes on me as I snap the padlock on my locker and hastily exit the room. 

Rule number one of solo female travel: never admit you are alone. The thing is, the rules aren’t really about solo travel. For the most part, they are about being a woman. 

“It’s just mostly stuff that I do around here. No creepy alleys. No being out too late. No being drunk and belligerent,” Moll says. 

White’s mother’s words about going somewhere she didn’t belong stayed with her when she left the country. 

“I felt really nervous … when my plane landed in Israel, in Tel Aviv … the airport’s not near the city, and so I was in the middle of what the Middle East looks like on the news, you know — the dirt and the desert … we were landing and I’m looking out the window, and I’m like, holy crap, I’m in the Middle East. What have I done?” White says.

That night, I tuck my towel into my bunk bed’s frame to create a flimsy curtain between myself and the overly interested man next door. At 6 a.m., after a night of fitful sleep, I roll out of bed and throw on my backpack. I don’t stop moving until I reach the train station and buy a ticket to Stirling, a city farther north, shaking off the feelings that I don’t want to color this trip. The decision pays off, and I find myself sitting up until the early hours of the morning talking with Laura and Aleyna, two German girls I meet in my new hostel.

Reality did not match White’s fears. Remembering the Middle East, she thinks about hummus so good she can never enjoy store-bought again and visiting the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Thinking about Scotland, I remember Laura and Aleyna. 

Hooked

Karsten spent that first solo trip hiking in the Badlands, visiting Mount Rushmore and seeing the Black Hills. 

“Then I was kind of hooked,” she says. Now Karsten sneaks in little trips wherever she can. By adding an extra day here or there when she would have to travel anyway for work, Karsten allows herself the time to travel, explore and hike around places she would otherwise fly through. A few days before I met her, she’d been hiking in Lake Guntersville State Park in Alabama.

White left her job in Madison to become a travel nurse, planning to use the newfound flexibility to see more of the country.

Johnson has become something of a seasonal nomad, moving across the country to work in Lake Powell each summer and spending her free time visiting the national parks she loves so much. 

Moll has been thinking about going to Thailand, continuing her habit of taking one international trip each year. 

As for me, my first solo travel experience gave me the confidence to take a job as an au pair this past summer, living with a family in northern Italy to help their 9-year-old daughter practice her English. 

Recently, Karsten stumbled upon a video of Mont Blanc, a mountain in the Alps with several popular routes tracing its circumference. She decided that it would be her next trip. There must be tons of good mountains to hike in Europe, Karsten thought, but she just happened to see and get excited about this one first. So, like she did before the first solo trip, she’ll set a date, request off work and just do it. It’s that simple.

“It’s hard to understand … some of those things that you overcome, and once you know that you can do them by yourself, it’s very empowering,” Karsten says. “And you build self-confidence. And it’s just really a cool feeling to know you can do those things.”