***For anyone new to my blog or who wants to know a little more about me:
Hi! Thanks for reading :) I'm Sophie, a 20 year old college student living in San Francisco, California. I'm a travel addict and go on as many long trips as often as possible. I started this blog 3 years ago when I spent 5 months traveling around Africa and Europe but since then, I haven't done any big international backpacking trips until this one. I'm really good at traveling cheap so I'll be sharing some cheap travel tips on here also. Here I go again!***
For my first new post, I wanted to give some background on my traveling history and talk about one of the questions I'm most often asked about traveling. Seeing as I'm a 20 year old girl, most people ask me if I'm afraid of traveling alone.
The answer is simple: No.
Traveling alone doesn't mean you're alone the whole time. Actually, it more-so means that you get to choose when you're alone and when you're not. As long as you stay in backpackers hostels, you'll have no problems making new friends if you push yourself a little.
The first time I really traveled alone (meaning not staying with friends the whole time) I was 16 years old. I was visiting a friend in the south of France but wanted to spend time in Paris first, so I rented myself an Airbnb for a few days. I basically just walked around Paris, met some people at a Couchsurfing event, and then got on another flight down to Toulouse where my friend and her family lived. (I should clarify that I'm bilingual in French so getting around and communicating there is very easy for me. My parents didn't just send me to a random foreign country where I couldn't find my way around).
When I got home from that trip, I realized how much I loved traveling, and how comfortable I felt doing it by myself. I decided I wanted to do a lot more of it, and soon. I was able to maneuver my way into graduating high school a semester early, and then I spent the next 5 months traveling around Africa and Europe by myself before starting college.
This is the trip that changed me as a person. I didn't want to be alone the whole time, so I just forced myself to start talking to random people in the hostels I was staying in or in bars (thankfully Europe doesn't care about drinking age, I was still 17). I also started going to events organized by Couchsurfing where I met a lot of other solo-travelers and made some close friends from around the world who I still talk to today.
To sum it up, traveling alone doesn't mean you're alone. If you want to meet new people, you just need to put yourself out there and start talking to strangers. This is what I'll be doing throughout my trip. I'll be taking lots of pictures and I'll try to post as often as I can with updates, cheap travel tips, and location tips for some of the sweet spots I discover.