Traveling alone is the best! It's the ultimate freedom. You can go where you want and do what you want without discussing it with anyone. That means you don't have to explain anything. If you want to sit on a park bench in a small rural town for an hour and just watch the people you can. No one is bothering you to go somewhere else or do something else. You can decide in the middle of the night that you want to check out of your hotel and fly three countries over. You can just do it.

You can meet and talk to all kinds of people without having to worry about what your friend might think or say. People will share the most amazing things with total strangers. You can chat up the guy next to you on the plane and find out he's an ex-NBA player traveling to pitch a business plan but he's really freaking out because he needs this to work, or make friends with a girl while looking for a greeting card only find out later after meeting up with her friends that she's was a prostitute for years and is really ashamed and afraid that her friends might find out, and that's why you all had to leave that particular nightclub.

Especially today, you can travel the world and know exactly where you are, arrange travel in minutes and still stay in touch with you friends anywhere in the world. And then eventually you end up with friends all over the world. And they are your friends. Not you and your spouse's friends, not you and your friend's friend, but YOUR friends.

All the best adventures happen when you travel by yourself and that experience teaches you all the best kind of resilience and confidence you can ever need. You can get into situations where you have NO idea how you are going to get out of it, but then you do, and you were the one that got you out of it. Do that a handful of times and you suddenly know that nothing in the world can stop you. Everyday setbacks are nothing compared to rolling a van over in the middle of snowstorm in the Wyoming wilderness, taking a 26 hour bus ride to escape a country being invaded, having your wallet and credit cards stollen on New Years eve in Paris, rescuing an injured dog just to have it pee all over your car, or even just navigating Schiphol airport to catch your connecting flight.

But even past the crazy. Being by yourself means you can savor every moment without being interrupted by the existence of another person. There is nothing like coming through a mountain pass by yourself and seeing all of Oregon laid out in front of you so far that you think you could see all the way to the Pacific, or sitting quietly enjoying an obscure painting in a tiny corner room of the Musee d'Orsay that you've wanted to see since you were 14 years old. Or even just sitting on a beach in Hawaii watching the sun set.

I think it all depends on why you travel. Maybe for you travel "isn't so much about the travel" maybe the journey isn't important to you. But for some of us, it definitely is entirely about the travel and the journey.

And for the record, I'm definitely not a woman or a chad, and I don't really care for alcohol, and I don't use instagram or other social media.