It isn’t often that a newspaper reporter publishes a truly distinguished book about the sensations of solitary travel, 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 traveling by yourself, without a travel companion.
She begins by explaining that a large and growing segment of the world’s population is made up of single persons. In the same proportions, a growing segment of all tourists are people who are either 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 traveling alone, for a week at a time, in Paris, Florence, Istanbul, and New York.
In a text given importance 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 solely alone, without the distractions of a companion.
The book is a handbook of smart travel. You will almost crave to make your next trip by yourself, as a solo traveler.
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: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude, and it is in all bookstores or available electronically.
