Will Solo Travel Have the Same Appeal After the Coronavirus?

1 ~~~ Will Solo Travel Have the Same Appeal After the Coronavirus? ~ Conde Nast Traveler ~~~

Two months of the coronavirus lockdown passed before I had my first conversation with a stranger. He was a middle-aged man, standing on a scenic trail in New Jersey that runs along the water, across the Hudson River from Manhattan. He had dismounted his road bike and was peering at something through a dense growth of trees. We were both wearing masks and so I thought it safe to pull over, dismount and, from six feet away, ask, “What is it?”

“Bald eagles!” the man said excitedly.

Incredulous, I followed his line of sight and saw them: two chicks the size of footballs, flapping their wings in anticipation of something. Their mother swooped in, her white head glistening in the late afternoon sunshine like a cue ball under bar lights.

The man—I never got his name—told me he was a professional optometrist and amateur bird-watcher. He said it had been 100 years since bald eagles had nested this close to New York City. I still don’t know if that’s true, but I prefer believing it.

The anonymity and serendipity of that brief interaction reminded me of traveling alone. It was the same brand of joy that I had experienced almost every day in 2019, which I spent traveling to a different place every week as the New York Times’s 52 Places Traveler. When you spend so much time in your own head and on the move, every little conversation takes on more weight. I felt a familiarity in my five-minute exchange with the eagle spotter—a feeling that, with each passing month, had felt more akin to dreams.

It also got me thinking about where the socially distanced future of travel leaves the solo traveler, that person who enjoys fortuitous meetings on the road and often moves around without a set itinerary. Or the backpacker, who is defined by a preference for the shared dorm and the packed local bus. If travel in general is heading for an uncertain future, could solo travel—at least in the improvisational form that I love—be a thing of the past?

As some cities around the world start to cautiously reopen—like taking the first steps into a cold lake on a hot day—signs of what travel in a pre-vaccine world could look like have begun to appear. There has been a flurry of headline-grabbing concepts: a restaurant in Amsterdam with tables isolated under protective bubbles, plexiglass cubicles dotting Italian beaches, contactless check-ins and the end of the lobby bar.

www.cntraveler.com/story/will-solo-travel-have-the-same-appeal-after-the-coronavirus ~ 3 July 2020 ~