Why Amsterdam. Why Solo. Why 46.

The longer answers to the questions behind the trip.

If you read my intro post, you already know the broad strokes. Amsterdam, September, alone, terrified of flying, but going anyway. What I didn’t get into was the actual backstory. The real reasons underneath the reasons. That’s what this is.

Why Amsterdam?

To understand why Amsterdam, you first have to understand the list. The list is long. Embarrassingly, gloriously long. I blame a significant portion of it on Rick Steves, who has spent decades making European travel look so accessible and rich that I have essentially added an entire continent to my itinerary one episode at a time. Thank you, Rick. Truly.

Current highlights: drinking beer at Oktoberfest in Munich, which feels spiritually correct given that I am 45% German. Standing in the medieval streets of Bruges, Belgium, the kind of place that looks like the set of A Knight’s Tale, except it’s actually real and you can get a beer there. (If you haven’t seen the movie, please fix that immediately – if only for the soundtrack.) And France, specifically Montpellier in the south, which I can’t fully explain except that something about it calls to me and I’ve been studying French long enough now to feel like I almost deserve to go.

France has always had a particular pull. I took French in high school and fell in love with the language. Something about the way it sounds, the way it feels to speak it. I never stopped wanting to use it. I tried Duolingo for a while, which helped, but recently I signed up for an in-person adult French class one night a week. It’s been one of the better decisions I’ve made lately. I’m learning the language I’ve always wanted to speak, and it doesn’t hurt that the class has given me a chance to meet people in a town that still feels new.

The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta has been on my list since a friend and I stumbled into the Great Forest Park Balloon Race glow in St. Louis years ago. I still think about that night. Wandering around with the summer evening on our skin, surrounded by enormous balloons lit up against the dark sky, the constant sound of fuel bursting to keep the fires going, that noise punctuating the air every few seconds as each balloon blazed back to life. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. I always meant to go back and never did. It never quite worked with my schedule, and if I’m being honest I just never made it a priority. Albuquerque is me deciding not to make that mistake twice, on a much larger scale.

Amsterdam was on the list too. So was everywhere else.

Here’s how it actually made it to September. Two friends visited separately within the past couple of years and both came back telling me the same thing: that I had to go. One of them said it was “just Jen,” whatever that means. The other friend rented a houseboat on Airbnb for her stay, floating on a canal in the middle of the city. I booked the same one. Some decisions make themselves.

It also doesn’t hurt that Amsterdam consistently ranks as one of the safest cities in the world for solo women travelers. When you’re planning your first solo international trip, that matters.

I already know what I want to do there. The Anne Frank House. The Van Gogh Museum. The Jordaan neighborhood, which I’ve read is exactly the kind of place you wander without a plan and end up somewhere perfect. Maybe a canal boat tour. Definitely sitting outside at a café with a coffee and whatever the locals are eating, watching the city go by. People watching is one of my great loves in life. I’m not nosey. I’m genuinely curious about how people live, what their days look like, what they care about. A city full of people who are not me, living lives I know nothing about, sounds like exactly the right place to be.

Although, full disclosure, Amsterdam was not actually my first idea for a first solo trip.

My first idea was Montreal. Short flight, French-speaking, manageable. A logical choice for someone who relatively recently developed a fear of flying and was trying to ease back into it gently. Montreal made sense. Montreal was practical. I was almost proud of myself for being so reasonable about the whole thing.

And then I thought: if I’m going to use credit card points to book a flight anyway, why not actually go somewhere? Montreal will always be there for a long weekend. Amsterdam requires a transatlantic flight and a certain amount of courage, and I figured I might as well deal with the fear head on rather than negotiate with it.

So. Amsterdam.

Why Solo Travel?

My husband and I are separated right now. We’re figuring out what our lives look like. It just is what it is, no villain in the story, just two people navigating something complicated and trying to do it with some grace.

What I know is that he has never had any desire to travel, and I have always had every desire to travel. Those two things were always going to create a gap eventually. Amsterdam was never going to be a trip we took together.

But here’s the bigger truth. Even if my circumstances were different, I think I’d be done waiting for someone to go with me. I have spent years adding places to lists and telling myself I’d go when the timing was right or when I found the right travel companion. And I have come to understand, with some real clarity, that if I keep waiting I might wait until I’m dead. I’d like to not do that.

I’ll miss sharing extraordinary moments with someone. I won’t pretend otherwise. There’s something specific and lovely about turning to a person you love and saying did you see that. I’m going to feel that absence on this trip and I’m making peace with it in advance.

But I’m also genuinely looking forward to days that belong entirely to me. No compromise. No negotiating whose preferences win. I can move as slowly as I want or fill every hour. I can be entirely, uninterruptedly myself. I’ve heard solo travel gives you something back that you didn’t know you’d lost, some version of yourself that only shows up when there’s no one else to perform for. I want to find out if that’s true.

Why 46?

My whole life I have wanted to travel the world. Not as a mild preference, but as something that felt like a burning. The kind of want that sits in your chest and doesn’t go away no matter how many years pass without being addressed. Just fundamentally part of who I am, as far back as I can remember.

And yet the years went by. Work was demanding. A daughter to raise, stepsons to help along, a family to hold together. Money felt tight or priorities felt elsewhere. I didn’t choose travel the way I chose other things, and I kept telling myself there would be time later, when the timing was better, when life settled down into something more manageable.

I’m 46. My daughter is grown with three kids of her own. My stepsons are finding their footing. Life did not settle down. It rearranged itself entirely.

So now is as good a time as any. Better, actually. Because I finally understand what I’ve been waiting for, and I’ve stopped waiting for anyone to give it to me.

Society hands you a script: work hard, climb the ladder, be responsible, defer the good stuff. Somewhere along the way you have to decide whether that script is actually yours or whether you’ve just been following it because no one handed you a different one. I’m writing myself a different one. Amsterdam is the first line.

I’m not starting from zero here. I’ve hiked Acadia and Yellowstone, driven the Pacific Coast Highway, stood on the shore at Cannon Beach. I’ve been to Jamaica, and Aruba, and Ireland, and Puerto Rico. I’ve learned, after one too many days parked at an all-inclusive resort wondering why I was bored, that I am not a beach chair person. I need to be moving, exploring, taking things in. Amsterdam is the next chapter of figuring out what that looks like entirely on my own terms.

For all I know, I’ll get there and discover I hate solo travel. Maybe I’ll spend the whole trip wishing I was home…with my cats. I’m holding that possibility with some humor. But I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen. I think what’s going to happen is that I get on the plane and something opens up that I didn’t know was closed.

Here’s something I’ve been sitting with lately. If I take one big trip a year from now until I’m too old to travel enjoyably, I’m looking at maybe 25 more trips. That’s it. Twenty-five. That number should probably scare me more than any transatlantic flight ever could, and honestly, it does. But it also makes every single trip feel urgent in the best possible way.

The flight is booked. September is coming. The list — Munich, Bruges, Albuquerque, Montpellier, Montreal eventually, and approximately forty other places — is waiting.

One trip at a time.

— Jen