The short version:

I’m a fulltime, Los Angeles-based journalist who has been traveling internationally since I was 16. My biggest passion is travel and though I have a life partner, I often go solo because of my flexibility with remote work and insatiable wanderlust.

In the last few years I’ve noticed an increased interest in solo female travel and that most women have a zillion questions and misgivings. I decided to start this site as a place that can help such women figure it all out and provide some inspiration for those who’ve been doing it for years.

I’m approaching this as a journalist would and not presenting only my own perspective, but the perspectives of women who live all over the world, women of all ages and all races and all backgrounds. Everybody should be able to see the perspective of someone who looks like them.

I will also be interviewing experts in travel and safety to make sure I’m covering all the bases. I hope you find this site helpful. Thank you for visiting.

The longer story:

The first time I flew on a plane, I was 9 years old and alone.

My parents had moved us across the country from Ohio to Arizona, more than 1,600 miles from my friends and the rest of my family. As consolation, they started putting me on a plane every summer to fly back to Ohio.

Of course they walked me to the plane, and my grandmother always met me at the gate in Detroit. And of course they notified flight attendants that I was unattended, paying an extra fee for them to watch out for me.

I don’t remember much about those flights except that I always wanted a window seat so I could watch in wonder as the Earth got smaller beneath me. I still prefer the window seat.

Those childhood flights are probably a big reason I became a solo traveler as a teenager. They taught me self-reliance at a young age, though it didn’t hurt that I was largely raised an only child in the far north Phoenix desert miles from the nearest stop light.

My next big travel step came when I was 16 and my junior year Spanish teacher announced she was organizing a class trip to Spain and that it’d be about $2,600 a student. I couldn’t wait to tell my parents. They were not as keen.

They told me I could go if I paid for it myself, which I’m now pretty sure was their secret way of stopping me. I was undeterred and began squirreling away the tip money I got as a server at IHOP.

Only three of us, all girls, ended up going on the trip with Mrs. Roberts. We spent two weeks going from Madrid down south through Sevilla, Córdoba, Granada and Málaga, topping off the adventure with a day trip to Tangiers, Morocco.

Going to Spain and Morocco at 16 gave me major culture shock but a thirst for more travel. Two years later I saved enough money to pay for a two-month study abroad in Alicante, Spain. It was my first international solo trip.

Since those days, I’ve taken solo trips up the California coast, down to the Arizona-Mexico border, into the heart of Mexico in Guadalajara, and back to Europe repeatedly.

During the pandemic, my longtime love of solo hiking developed into my first solo backpacking trips and a dream to summit Mount Whitney, the tallest peak in the lower 48 at just over 14,500 feet. I’ve scored permits to climb Whitney twice in the past two years but each trip had to be canceled because of wildfires and a winter storm.

I balance my solo life with being a fiancée, a proud dog and cat mom, and a fulltime journalist. While I do travel with my fiancé and with friends, I’m always looking for ways to fit in alone time, whether it’s a two-night backpacking trip to the Sierra Nevada or an eight-day solo trek of the West Highland Way in Scotland.

In the last couple years, I’ve joined some online forums for solo female travelers and some of my favorite TikTok content is of women documenting the trips they take by themselves. I’ve noticed that a lot women are interested in solo travel but many don’t know where to begin.

I started this website to help. I want to share my decades of experience traveling alone and help other women learn how to do the same, how to stay safe and why solo travel is so rewarding.

I’ve dedicated an entire section of She Goes Alone to safety. In my experience talking to women interested in solo travel, it’s their No. 1 concern and there are so many questions.

The solo diary section of She Goes Alone will be my day-to-day solo experiences, from going to Coachella alone to see Beyoncé to booking an opulent afternoon tea at an upscale hotel in Dublin. I hope that sharing these stories helps demystify solo travel as a woman and how I’ve built my up my confidence to walk into any situation alone and comfortable.

I don’t want to just rely on my own experiences. I can only speak to traveling as a straight, cisgender white woman. So I’m dedicating an entire section of She Goes Alone to the stories of other solo female travelers of all types. I want to know why they choose solo travel, what they love about it, what difficulties they’ve encountered.

We can all learn from each other and hopefully become more confident, self-sufficient and prolific travelers. Thank you for reading.