[Submission] A guide to solo travelling for bad bitches (send love telepathically)
A 28 step guide to travel, self-exploration, and coming out unscathed.
One thing about me, I know who I am. If I don’t, I’ll drop everything to meet me where I am.
And she was in Lisbon, Portugal. I chased her all the way to Italy, France and then the Netherlands.
Seriously - in this economy? God, I know.
Still I flew. Sold my iPad, reduced my wardrobe to a purple Samsonite, took several coach buses and train rides on a whimsy. At one point I touched the soil of 4 different countries within 24 hours.
For nearly 2 months; it was me, my self-inflicted loneliness (a 2 year long heartache), remote job (yes, I, employed), award-winning face card (don’t you forget it bitch), and brand new Skechers (she’s walking) against the world.
To be fair, I thought I was going to run away permanently. Which makes me wonder - did you run away? Or could they just not find you?


Burn everything
Reconnect with an old acquaintance before your flight to burn old journals. Unfortunately ghost her months later because you couldn’t handle all the secrets she wanted you to hold. Hold them anyway but faraway. Send love telepathically.
Buy a Sonny Angel before your trip
Shake at least 10 boxes with the store employee so you don’t get a bald looking one. Lose it in Sète a month later. Show a picture of it to the dude working at the hostel you’re staying at, who takes out a paper and pen. Make him laugh by asking, “are you going to draw it?”
Keep a mini altar
Order a palm-sized ouija board tin of mints and devour them in 2 days. Fill the tin with your favourite crystals, lavender, fake money, and a dead ladybug. Leave room for the new.
For what won’t fit in your altar, put them in your earlobes or around your neck. In fact, get a whole new piercing to accommodate a carnelian to sit alongside your malachite, labradorite, peridot, and moonstone - also known as the traveller’s medley.
Learn how to say a few words in a few different languages
Download Duolingo to learn Portuguese for no other reason than Lisbon being your first stop. Fantasize about deep frying that green owl and dousing him in garlic parmesan sauce.
Use your grade 9 level Canadian French to gift a seashell to a random French lady, then walk away awkwardly.
Notice how beautiful non-verbal communication is - send love telepathically.
Get games on your phone
Solitaire for when you’re waiting because you’re going to be doing that a lot.
Pokémon Go because there’s no way you’re not taking advantage of all the walking. And to feel a sense of superiority when you find an egg in a foreign country.
And Royal Match for when you’re tired of playing Solitaire and Pokémon Go, but proceed with caution.
In fact, if you take any advice from me today, it’s to delete Royal Match after your trip.
Take the Uber to your accommodation
You are not better off saving €30. I’ll never forget when I ran over a woman’s sandaled foot with my suitcase because I couldn’t keep up with the Paris Métro rush.
Lord forgive me, for I have been a tourist.
Get to know the local grocery store intimately
Buy some pasta, cereal, milk, bread, cheese and colourful bottles of smoothies. Eat 1.5 meals at “home” and walk 1-2 km for coffee.
Do not ask for an iced americano unless the place looks a little gentrified.
Pretend you’re a local
Life is fun when you play pretend. Especially if you’re coming out of a weird time that’s been exacerbated by the stresses of the Western world. Let humanity restore your faith by showing you how you don’t know anything.
In other words, learn how to get a ticket on your phone, and when to smile at strangers.
Take pictures of all the cool graffiti to breathe in what troubles the local youth. You’ll find that it’s the same everywhere.
Hang out with your Airbnb host
Bonus points if her name is Filipa, queer, and loves the beach as much as you do. Drive 30 minutes to a cloudy one in her Mini Cooper. Wear your new monokini.
Let her take you to an illegal restaurant in Lisbon - which is just a Chinese restaurant that lets you smoke indoors and other shit that’s none of our business.
Try kimchi with her for her first time at a fated Korean bar, and tag plaster walls with the words she helped you translate. Send love telepathically.
Wear sunscreen
Don’t be stupid like me and think you can take on the south-western European sun. She is built differently. Disrespect her and you will pay for it months later in the form of transepidermal water loss.
Start smoking cigarettes again
You had me at €5.50 for a pack of Camels. Ponder the entirety of your trip if you should start smoking roll ups only to keep buying new packs because This Is Who We Are.
Only smoke roll ups if they belong to someone else.
Take yourself out for a semi-luxurious seafood dinner
You can get a free “wine tasting” by harmlessly seducing the waitstaff and trying a sip of all their wine before choosing the sweetest one.
Because you don’t give a shit about wine, and I just wanted to seduce the waitstaff.
Order oysters and sea urchin as appetizers, and the stuffed crab as your main. Order lots of lemon slices and bread. Accidentally hit the woman beside you with a rogue piece of crab shell. Laugh.


When in big (expensive) cities, stay at hostels
Automatic green flag if they have cats and a garden. The breakfast add-on can be worth it, but only if you know how to wake up before noon.
Here, you’ll learn to clean up after yourself like a pro because nobody likes a bitch who doesn’t do their own dishes.
Most hostels will also have a fridge where you can keep your groceries, as well as free food that other guests left behind that you can claim.
Which means it’s time to pretend you’re on Chopped.
Buy a padlock and bring your own towel
Some hostels will give you one for free but most will charge you. Some hostels also think body wash and shampoo are the same thing.
By the time I got to Venice, I agreed.
Give up on taking everything showers
Skip the conditioner and use a leave-in one instead.
Realize your hair is so dry because the water at home is hard. Entertain the idea of moving to the Netherlands solely for the tap water. And maybe because you thought you met your soulmates.
Kick yourself for not bringing shower shoes and worry about foot disease.
Get over yourself.
Keep your toothpaste, toothbrush and skincare in your carry-on
Because sometimes you’ll feel less than human after a long ass bus ride and want to make yourself at home in a public washroom.
Don’t forget your vibrator
There’s a word between shameful and shameless and I’m going to call it shamely. Shamely put it in your toiletry bag every morning before you shower. You slut.
Microwaveable popcorn
Popcorn takes up virtually no space in your luggage until you pop it.
A German girl I met in Italy showed me this trick. We chased down buses and scared off men together.
I read her cards and she told me about her boyfriend. Despite knowing all the red flags, she still couldn’t see a life better than him. 19 and you think your life is over, I thought. We’ve failed our youth, I thought.
Send love telepathically.
Get Chinese food during Mercury Retrograde
The fortune cookie will save you.
Men are for lifting suitcases
Tap into your inner damsel and allow men to carry your voluptuous suitcase up and down the stairs. That means don’t always assume there will be elevators or escalators - especially at cross-city train stations.
Sure, you could avoid all of this by becoming a backpacker - but this is a guide for bad bitches.
Steal the Mona Lisa
The only real reason to go to the Louvre.
Be pleasantly surprised and starstruck when you see Cupid and Psyche - your dream blunt rotation, celebrity crushes and cosmic parents all in one.


The cemetery is a place of respite
Find one by the sea while you’re trying not to die from heatstroke. Pick a flower from a tree for your altar and relish in the fact that the dead still fuck with you.
Meet a cat who greets you like you know each other. Let it make biscuits on your lap with dusty paws. Call yourself a pussy magnet. Send love telepathically.
Ask the ocean for advice
In Lisbon, she said “I love you.”
In Venice, she assured me “it’s okay to have schizophrenia.” I needed that.
And in Sète, the ocean playfully threatened to kill me.
Collect sea shells and add them to your altar - they will protect you.
Always go to karaoke night
Put on a damn wig, pick a stage name (mine was Scarlett and Twilight), and Beyoncé the shit out of everyone.
Consider starting a band with the people you meet that night. Send love telepathically.

When in doubt, ignore that man
Being beautiful is so much more fun once you stop trying to make everyone comfortable at your own expense.
He will survive and you paid way too much for that plane ticket to act like he won’t.
Fall in love as many times as you want
Accept that you might be polyamorous.
Struggle to sleep as you purge years of heteronormative and monogamous desires and beliefs.
Decide you don’t want to be in a polycule - because it sounds like a pain you’d only enjoy for 6 months and that’s pushing it.
Perhaps love is not a choice, but commitment certainly is.
Absentmindedly wonder how polyamorous people must have a lot of time on their hands, and then realize you’re already in a polycule with your many selves.
Be mysterious and secretive
Not because your sense of trust’s been absolutely obliterated the last few years when you needed people the most.
And definitely not because you think about every person that made you feel like your sensitivity was something to fix at night.
You certainly don’t think of your two ex-roommates who couldn’t understand why you wanted to leave after a year and a half of cheap shots and emotional volatility.
Or that one friend who used the death of another human being to emotionally manipulate you and then blocked you when you didn’t fall for it.
It doesn’t fill you with inexplicable confusion and grief when you think of several groups of friends and classmates with tainted alliances and toxic partners that made you feel like the villain for not wanting to sit back and ignore it all.
Who couldn’t meet your differences with their hearts, and how they all move like a goddamn sorority.
No - be guarded so when you look back, you’ll see how you were in the thick of it. And how you were so desperate to get out of it that you didn’t realize that someday you’d look back with such compassion for when you were in the thick of it.


Go home
Not before you promise everyone you’ll come back in a couple months.
Only to change the trajectory of your life when you’re reminded of what your bed feels like. How nice it is to take a bath every night during your luteal phase. To howl at the moon.
That’s when you’ll run away from the runaway. Run right home just in time to start again. You know what they say - you’re not a real hustler if you can’t lose it all and get it back.
I consider this unscathed.
About the author: Danielle is a magical being whose magical practices focus on the preservation of the self through spirituality in liminal spaces in order to create new possibilities and experiences - which can literally mean anything. You can find her in her bedroom or on Instagram @lilseafoam.
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