Untethered

I spent most of my forties believing that adventure was something other people did. People who were braver, younger, less encumbered. Then one morning the kind of grey, unremarkable morning that shouldn't change your life I realised I'd been waiting for permission that was never going to come.

So I booked a flight. No plan. No itinerary beyond a borrowed cottage near the sea. I packed walking boots, a good rain jacket, and a camera I barely knew how to use. I told myself it was just a holiday. It wasn't. It was the beginning of a completely different relationship with myself.

Solo travel after 50 isn't about proving anything. It's not about ticking off bucket-list landmarks or posting from picturesque cafés. It's about discovering that you are perhaps for the first time in decades genuinely free to choose how you spend your hours, your attention, your wonder.

"The best journeys don't take you away from yourself. They bring you back."

Nature became my compass. Not cities or crowds or nightlife, but coastlines, mountain trails, forest paths, and retreats where silence wasn't awkward it was the whole point. I found that walking alone in a beautiful landscape wasn't lonely. It was the most clarifying thing I'd ever done.