Travel writer endorses the pleasures of travelling alone
It isn’t often that a newspaper reporter publishes a truly distinguished book about the sensations of solitary travel and the rewarding emotions you feel when abroad by yourself in a strange city. Yet that is the achievement of Stephanie Rosenbloom of The New York Times in her recently published “Alone Time.”
Rosenbloom, a staff columnist for the Times, is known for her extremely lucid and helpful columns about various practical aspects of travel. But in “Alone Time,” she talks about the feelings you can and should experience while travelling without a companion.
She begins by explaining that a large and growing segment of the world’s population is made up of single people. In the same proportions, a growing segment of all tourists are people who either are alone by circumstance or are people who have consciously decided to travel alone. Yet instead of bemoaning that latter condition, she exults in it by describing the pleasures she has had by travelling alone, for a week at a time, in Paris, Florence, Istanbul and New York.
In a text given weight by excerpts from the works of remarkable novelists and philosophers, she takes you on a visit to the above cities, and in the most entertaining possible manner, she describes the joy she found in reacting to the sights and experiences of those cities alone, without the distractions of a companion.
The book is a handbook of smart travel. You will almost long to make your next trip as a solo traveller. And she ends this entertaining tome with a chapter detailing all the aid you can find in websites and apps for memorable solo travel.
The book is “Alone Time” and is subtitled “The Pleasures of Solitude,” and it is available in all bookstores, or electronically.