Have you ever had great expectations for something that weren’t realized? Maybe it was an event you had been looking forward to that got canceled, your dream job that turned out to be a nightmare, or someone you had up on a pedestal who turned out to be very, very flawed?  I recently had an [...]

I am not a spontaneous person. I don’t decide on a whim to play hooky from work to go to the beach, or run over to a friend’s house on the spur of the moment without calling first. And I’ve never just up and booked a last-minute trip. No, I’m too much of a planner [...]

Two days ago, I was reading a post by Matt Long of LandLopers called “Travel Isn’t Pretty”. I started to comment on his post and realized I had so much I wanted to say in response to his opening paragraphs that perhaps I should just write my own post in response. So, thanks Matt, for [...]

You might be a travel procrastinator if: You’ve ever said “When I retire, I’m going to travel to [my dream destination].” You’ve ever said “I really want to go to [my dream destination] as soon as I can find someone to go with.” You keep saying “Next year, I’m not staying home on my vacation, [...]

Believe it or not, today marks the third blogiversary of SoloFriendly.  Let’s see a show of hands:  How many of you have been reading this blog since February 18, 2008?  Yeah, don’t feel bad, I don’t think even my mother was reading back then. It took awhile for SoloFriendly to build an audience, largely because [...]

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving.  Happy Hannukah, my Jewish friends! Before I get to my favorite travel posts from this past month, I want to make a little plug for a good cause: As you consider where to spend your charitable dollars this holiday season, I hope you’ll consider a donation to [...]

As I alluded to earlier this week in my Shiny Travel Objects column, October was a very busy month for me, and I have a whole slew of people to thank for that. Not only did I read a ton of great posts by other travel bloggers, but I had a lot going on with [...]

Happy November!  I hope you all got a chance to enjoy some fall foliage and a great Halloween wherever you may have been in October.  It was a busy month for me, but I’ll cover all that in another blog post.  One thing that occupied a lot of my time in the past month was [...]