I walked out of a travel agency in Sapa, Vietnam, with the wrong tour booked.
I knew what I wanted before I went in. I wanted a private tour, about six hours, to the waterfalls and through the rice fields. The agency was offering a twelve-hour group tour that covered more ground and cost about forty dollars less. I lost my goal for a moment and walked out with the wrong booking.
It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I wanted. I knew exactly what I wanted. The thing is that forty dollars felt real money, real value.
This episode is about what’s actually different at 40 when you travel solo, and the difference has very little to do with the budget or the boutique hotel. By 40 you already know what you want clearly enough to design the trip around it, and the work at this stage of life is to stop overriding that clarity when something cheaper or more convenient is on offer.
In this episode:
- The 40+ solo travel question
- Sapa, and what I want
- Booking and unbooking the wrong tour
- Six hours at my own pace
- What a private tour really gives
- The question that changed
- The advantage isn’t the budget
- This week’s invitation
“The whole point is that you’ve had enough time, you’ve had lots of years for you to develop some clarity.”
Damianne
What does the 40+ solo travel advantage actually look like?
The advantage at 40+ is clarity. By the time you reach this point, you’ve spent enough years figuring out what you actually like. There is real research on this, called self-concept clarity, which shows that how well and how consistently you know yourself increases measurably through midlife. The findings are documented across the lifespan in this research on possible selves and self-clarity.
For me, clarity is specific. I want my suitcases (plural), a comfortable hotel where I can walk out the front door and be in the middle of things, fresh fruit on arrival, and a view from my room that makes me pause every time I look out. More than any of that, I want to be able to stop for the view. I want to be able to stop when I see lychees on the side of the road, or buffalo ice cream, or a small thing that piques my interest. That is what I travel for at this stage. I travel with pleasure, and I want enough space to savor the delight.
What rule are you still traveling with that belongs to an older version of you?
That clarity sometimes gets pushed aside by old habits or rules. In Sapa, the rule I was still carrying around was the money one. Forty dollars felt like a significant saving. That rule made sense when I was 25, when money was tighter. It served me for years. It also stopped fitting at some point, but I didn’t notice until I was standing on a street in Sapa with a tour I didn’t want booked under my name.
A lot of us are still carrying rules like that. Rules about saving money on transportation, about not turning down a deal, about eating fast and cheaply on the road so you can do more things in a day. They were good rules once. The question is whether you’ve updated them to match the person you are right now, with the budget and energy you have. and kind of trip you actually want.
Let’s start by noticing and naming these rules. What’s a rule you’re still traveling with that belongs to an older version of you? This is the same territory I worked through in Why Not? Stop Overthinking Solo Travel, and the smaller-decisions practice in the episode on the decisions that build a solo traveler is where we explored the work.
What changed when the question changed?
Both of these past episodes look at the questions we ask ourselves in each situation. For a long time, the question I carried into every trip was: can I handle this? Could I manage the arrival, the transport, the language, being alone for that long? After more than forty-five solo trips, the answer has always been yes. This gives me space to ask a different question.
The new question is: what do I actually want here, right now? This question changes the perspective “Can I handle this?” is a question you can only answer by going. “What do I actually want here?” is a question you can answer in a cafe in Sapa on a Friday afternoon, with a coconut coffee and a WhatsApp message to the agency. It is the question that got me to send a message, walk back, pay the forty dollars, and have the day I actually wanted. When the trip is built around that question, you come home with something specific: a sense of possibility, of openness, a real thirst for life. I went deeper into that feeling in What really makes a solo trip “worth it”.
You know what delights you. You have been figuring this out for decades. The work isn’t to discover it but rather to listen for it and design around it.
A small invitation
So my invitation for this week is simple. Write down what actually delights you when you travel. Not the itinerary, not the bucket list, but the conditions. Is it ease? Is it nature? Is it being able to stop for a small thing on the side of the road? Is it a guide who can read your energy? Is it a room with a view? Write those down. That is what you design around. Everything else is negotiable.
Join the next workhop
I’m running a workshop for women who have already decided they want to take a solo trip and want help designing the trip they actually want. The one that brings you home with that sense of possibility, not the one that looks responsible from the outside. If that’s the conversation you’re ready to have, the link is below.