The Case for a Solo Trip: What Happens When You Finally Go Alone

A note from Melissa, the host behind Tanglebloom Cabin — and someone who took a long time to figure this out.

photo by Krystina Olsen Studio

It was 2010, and I was in my twenties, and I had somehow talked myself into going alone to an off-grid cabin in New York’s Finger Lakes.

I don't remember if I was nervous about it beforehand. I think I was too young and probably too excited to be really nervous — the kind of nervous that requires enough free time to imagine everything that could go wrong. I just went.

What I remember is what happened when I arrived.

The cabin was small and handmade and full of the kind of details that told you someone cared — really cared — about the person staying there. On the table, in a mason jar, my host had arranged flowers from her garden. Fresh-cut flowers, set out for a stranger who would arrive and stay alone for a few days and then leave. That detail wrecked me a little, in the best possible way. Someone had thought about me before I got there. Someone had made something beautiful for me, just because.

I spent those days cooking simply, reading for hours, and walking every afternoon to a nearby waterfall for a swim. There was no agenda. No one to coordinate with. No compromises about where to eat or when to leave or whether the hike was too long. Just my own rhythm, which it turned out I hadn't heard clearly in a while.

I came home different. More grounded. Like I'd remembered something about myself that I'd been too busy to notice was missing.

I also came home knowing, with a certainty that surprised me, that I wanted to create something like that for other people someday. A place with flowers on the table. A place where someone arrived and felt: there is someone who thought about you before you got here.

That feeling was immediately followed by the melancholy of "how — and when — will I ever be able to do that." It felt like a dream I might not be allowed to have.

I filed it away. And life kept going.

The Second Trip: Eight Years Later, Much Harder

My next real solo trip wasn't until 2018.

A lot had happened by then. I had a toddler. I had a farm — a real one, with its own exhausting seasonal rhythms. And I had arrived at that particular stage of early parenthood where the idea of three nights alone felt simultaneously like the most desperately needed thing in the world and an act of stunning selfishness.

I chose a rustic off-grid cabin in Vermont, accessible only by a short hike in. I booked it for the fall, which I told myself was practical — I had farm planning to do, end-of-season wrap-up thinking, and a toddler who would be perfectly fine with their other parent for 72 hours.

What I did not account for was the storm.

I arrived in the cold and dark in wind and rain, fingers fumbling for firewood, genuinely questioning every decision that had led me to this moment. I had left my child. I had left my farm — which still needed to be put to bed before winter, and I seriously wondered if my greenhouse would be standing when I returned. I was standing in the dark in the woods with numb hands and a woodstove that hadn't been lit yet, and I thought: what am I doing?

This is, I have come to understand, a completely normal part of solo travel. Especially for people who have spent years building lives full of obligations and other people's needs. There is always a moment — on the drive, in the grocery store parking lot, fumbling for firewood in the dark and wind — where the whole thing feels like a mistake.

It’s not a mistake. It’s  just the gap between your regular life and this one, and you have to cross it.

The fire caught. The cabin warmed. I made tea and sat on the floor close to the woodstove and let my hands thaw and felt the tightness in my body slowly loosen.

“There is always a moment where the whole thing feels like a mistake. It is not a mistake. It is just the gap between your regular life and this one.”

What I Actually Did (And What It Taught Me)

Here is the part I'm a little embarrassed to admit, but I think it matters.

Once I settled in, I opened my laptop. I had told myself that the real reason for this trip was to plan the next season for the farm. Away from the noise and laundry, I would think clearly. I would be strategic. I would produce.

And I did. I worked diligently on my laptop until the battery died. I felt, I remember, intensely proud of what I'd accomplished.

The battery dying (with no way to charge it) was the best thing that happened to me on that trip.

Because after that, there was nothing left to do but be there. Between sessions at the woodstove and slow walks in the woods between storms, a rhythm emerged on its own — the kind you can only find when no one else's schedule is shaping your day. My host had left banana bread, and I ate it slowly and without guilt. The storm raged outside and I stayed warm inside and it was, without much fanfare, exactly what I needed.

I think a lot of us do this. We justify the solo trip with productivity. With a project, a goal, a plan. We make it make sense in the language of usefulness because pure rest — rest for its own sake — feels harder to defend. To ourselves, to our partners, to the small voice in our heads that has absorbed every message about hustle and output and the virtue of being needed.

But the productivity is just a permission slip. And eventually, usually, the permission slip runs out. The battery dies. The work gets done. And what's left is the actual thing: you, alone, with yourself, in a place that has no agenda for you.

That's where it gets interesting.

The Thing That Actually Shifts

On my last night, I woke up in the middle of the night and padded across the dark cabin to find the bathroom. The storm had cleared. There was a tall rectangular window — floor to ceiling — and framed perfectly inside it was Orion.

I stood there for a long time. Just that: a woman alone in a cold cabin in Vermont at two in the morning, looking at a constellation. I live on a farm. I am not exactly someone who comes from a place of relentless noise and stimulation. But even I had forgotten to look up. Even I had needed to be taken out of my regular life and placed in front of a window with nothing to do but notice.

That's the thing that shifts on a solo trip. Not anything dramatic. Not a revelation or a reinvention. Just the quiet return to yourself — to your own perceptions, your own pace, your own sense of what is actually beautiful and worth standing still for.

I made a vow that night. That I would always do this — a solo retreat, however brief, however long between trips. That no matter what life gave me, I would find my way back to a window like that one.

I haven't always kept it perfectly. Life has a way of filling up. But I've kept it enough to know that it's one of the most important promises I've ever made to myself.

People ask me sometimes what solo travel is like, and I find it hard to describe accurately without sounding either dramatic or annoyingly woo. So I'll try to be specific.

You find out that you're better company than you thought. That the aloneness, once you stop bracing against it, is actually kind of spacious and good. You find out what you really want for breakfast, how fast you actually walk, what you think about when no one else is in the room. It sounds small. It isn't.

And then you bring that back home with you. A little more settled. A little more certain of yourself. A little more able to be present with the people you love, because you spent a few days being present with yourself.

What Tanglebloom Was Always About

When I finally started sharing Tanglebloom Cabin — the flowers, handmade details, the wood-burning hot tub, the farm — I thought often about that table in the Finger Lakes. About arriving somewhere and feeling that someone had thought about you before you got there.

That's what I try to make. A place where travelers don't feel like they're missing something. Where the cabin is complete as it is, for whoever is in it. Where you can work on a project until your laptop battery dies if you must, and then sit with the fire and let the rest come.

If you've been thinking about a solo trip, I want to say: do it. Not because it will be perfect. Not because it will be easy, especially at first. But because there is something waiting for you on the other side of the fumbling-in-the-dark moment, and it is genuinely worth crossing for.

Tanglebloom is open May through October. There’s a two-night minimum (but most guests tell us three is the sweet spot). Just you, the cabin, the farm, and the fire.

I'll have flowers on the table.

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