I tried. I really did. To stop romanticizing solo travel. That era is in the past. I’m now a mom and a wife. My life is now all about family travel. I told myself that the season had passed, that the urge would naturally fade once my life reorganized itself around naps, solids, soiled diapers, growth charts, endless tiny clothes to laundry and fold, and the soft tyranny of routines that keep a small human alive and relatively happy. But the truth is less tidy: solo travel still lives in me—loud and persistent— even when I’m deeply fulfilled at home. Especially then.

While looking at the ski slope donning its early autumnal attire in the massive balcony in my room in Malbun (Liechtenstein), I instinctively knew then that would be my last solo trip for a while.

I consciously decided to. My mind listened to my burgeoning growing-a-life body. The airports became heavier. The walking, which for me is synonymous to city travels, became harder. And while I learned to love long walks in winter, the pregnant Jona didn’t enjoy the ordeal guised as doctor’s orders to go out and about. And the long Flixbus rides just became unbearably long. I remember the 7-hour bus ride from Munich to Frankfurt and back. The not-pregnant Jona thoroughly enjoyed long bus rides, I eventually learned long bus rides were unforgiving to very pregnant humans.

The mental arithmetic of “is this worth it?” changed. Travel turned from instinct to negotiation. So I stayed put. Then the baby came, and staying put stopped feeling like a choice at all but more like a given. The pragmatic it is what it is. 

Motherhood indeed rewires how you want things. Every urge now runs through logistic firsts, who looks after the baby, can my husband handles it, can I trust him doing it “right?”, how long can I be away till my husband loses it or worse  my baby forgets my smell, then my very existence? Is it worth disrupting the solid yet easily disrupted evening routines?

Wanting solitude and solitary movement started to feel indulgent. And selfish. 

And yet, solo travel never fully left. It just went quiet, like a radio humming in another room. It just slipped out of reach, buring under planning and the unspoken question of whether you’re allowed to want it this much. Whether you allow yourself to want it this much. 

When I traveled alone again for the first time, it wasn’t even for pleasure. It was a professional obligation. A necessary economic absence. Work required me to be away from home for three nights. I negotiated myself down to two and felt proud of that compromise, as if restraint itself were a virtue to be rewarded.   And that’s how I realized that I actually missed traveling solo again: the muscle memory of packing everything within 15 minutes kicked in. The joy of sitting alone in a train, alone in a sea of strangers—they themselves on the way to somewhere.  Ah, that feeling of being a stranger among strangers on a long train ride.  

I also remembered the muscle memory of moving through a city alone. The way my shoulders square differently when no one else’s needs trail behind me. The silence that isn’t empty but expansive. I remembered how being alone in transit sharpens me. I notice things again — smells, overheard conversations, the way late afternoon light hits unfamiliar buildings. I also remembered how disorienting it can be to step back into that version of myself after a long absence. Independence, it turns out, isn’t a switch you flip. It’s a rhythm you have to relearn. For a moment there, I felt like an infant myself, discovering the very existence of my own feet and marveling at the fact that I can will them.

The first intentional solo trip after becoming a mother came later. Sarandë and Ksamil, Albania, via Corfu, Greece. The baby was one year and seven months old. On paper, it looked like a return. 

In reality—beyond the muscle memory of perfecting and completing the packing within 15 minutes, mom guilt included—solo travel felt like amnesia.

I had completely forgotten how to travel solo. And that was shocking.

Not in the Instagram sense. I remembered how to book things, how to get from A to B despite my chronic illness of getting lost. But I’d forgotten the internal pacing of it. The way you listen to yourself when there’s no one else to calibrate against. It was ten AM, and the beach was 5 minutes away, and yet there I was in bed watching a stupid Netflix show. And it just dawned on me that my desire to be horizontal in bed, away from stares and strangers was perfectly normal if I  put the immigrant motherhood lens in place: Jona, enjoy this very precious expensive moment of doing nothing!  I mean perhaps paying €400 for three nights meant nothing for others, but for you that was a lot of money.  And when was the last time you stayed in bed til 10AM? Actually routinely, every Saturday? But staying in bed until 10 AM two days in a row. I hadn’t had that since giving birth. So rotting in bed already felt like a holiday, hearing the chirps of the sparrows in the small olive orchard by the balcony facing a small chapel was a bonus.

And while I had no trouble eating alone in cities, I found myself feeling awkward looking for a space  on an overly crowded beach. Barely none unless you pay €25 for a day use of a beach lounge, which I would do without batting an eyelash next time. I was so sorrily embarrassed and awfully awkward of being on a public beach that I wasted my first day on a supposed solo beach holiday without even a warm dip in the ​​Mediterranean—the very reason why I demanded this much-deserved solo trip—I missed the summery sea and lounging on the beach for hours, only entertaining thoughts like what should I have for dinner. Only thinking about food? Who am I kidding? 

Ksamil didn’t help.

I ended up somewhere that was the opposite of what I needed. Loud, chaotic, overstimulating. “Gasolina” competing with Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” across beach bars that had no interest in subtlety or silence. Basslines colliding in the air like territorial animals. Jet skis, shouting, the constant hum of overtourism  doing what it does best: flattening nuance.

For an omnitrovert newly inducted into motherhood, it was brutal.

I had wanted quiet. I wanted the kind of beach where you can hear your own thoughts misbehaving. Instead, I got noise that made me feel way older than I am and more vulnerable than I’d like to admit. I found myself craving structure again—naps, predictability, the very things I’d once fantasized about escaping. The irony wasn’t lost on me.

And still, even there, even irritated and underslept and slightly resentful of my own poor planning, the romanticizing didn’t stop.

Because solo travel, for me, has never been about perfection. It’s not about aesthetic mornings or cinematic loneliness. It’s about autonomy in its rawest form. The ability to sit with discomfort without needing to manage anyone else’s. The freedom to misjudge a destination and live with the consequences quietly. The permission to be disappointed without having to soften it for someone else.

Motherhood sharpens that desire instead of dulling it.

When you are responsible for another human’s emotional baseline most of the day, solitude becomes a resource. Not a luxury. Alone time at home is never fully alone. There’s always the mental load humming in the background—what needs to be bought, washed,  cooked, scheduled, remembered. 

Solo travel, even imperfect solo travel, is one of the few contexts where that hum drops to a murmur.

But here’s the part people don’t love hearing: romanticizing solo travel as a mother doesn’t mean I want to escape my child. It means I refuse to collapse my identity into a single role just because it’s currently the loudest one.

There’s an unspoken expectation that once you become a mother, certain longings should dissolve on their own. That if they don’t, something is misaligned. I don’t buy that. Desire doesn’t operate on moral timelines. Loving your child doesn’t automatically neutralize your need for self-directed experiences. If anything, it clarifies them.

What has changed is not the longing but the texture of it.

Before motherhood, solo travel was expansive. It was about endless possibility. About who I might become in motion. Now, it’s more reflective. More contained. I’m not chasing transformation anymore. I’m checking in. Asking quieter questions. Measuring the distance between who I am at home and who I am when no one needs me for a few days.

And yes, there’s guilt. It shows up mid-meal, mid-day, mid-thought,  late at night. Always uninvited. Always instrusive. It asks whether the cost is worth it, whether absence leaves a mark, whether independence is selfish when someone else calls you mama. Whether you’re  causing unnecessary trauma to the little one who is still dependent on his mama. I don’t pretend those questions disappear just because I answer them once.

But guilt is not the same as regret.

I know what I’ll regret more is the idea of letting parts of myself atrophy out of compliance. Of teaching my child, subtly but persistently, that motherhood means shrinking. That care only flows outward. That longing is something you outgrow if you’re doing life “right.”

Solo travel now is messier. A lot shorter. Less romantic in practice and more romantic in memory. Sometimes it’s loud Albanian beach towns when you wanted silence. Sometimes it’s hotel rooms that feel too big. Sometimes it’s an almost untouched wine bottle with Netflix blaring on your iPad while texting your husband if the little one had a good dinner or how the bedtime routine was. Sometimes it’s realizing you’ve changed enough that the old version of freedom doesn’t fit the same way. 

But I keep romanticizing it because it still represents choice.

Yes, it’s escape. Hell yes,  it’s necessary rebellion. But above all, it’s a choice. A deliberate intentional choice.

The choice to be alone with myself without explanation. The choice to move through the world without narrating every step. The choice to remember that I am a person who existed before motherhood and will exist beyond its most consuming years.

I don’t need solo travel to be perfect anymore. Heck, it never was. I just need it to be mine.

And maybe that’s the real shift. Romanticizing solo travel as a mother isn’t about pretending nothing changed. It’s about insisting that something of me remains unchanged enough to be worth revisiting, even when the music is too loud, the beach is wrong, and I’m more tired and terribly needed a good Filipino breakfast than I expected to be.

I still go. Not because it’s easy. But because it reminds me that I am allowed to.