A beautiful summer's day in Venice. I exit the train, excited to spend my single day exploring the watery kingdom. A raindrop threatens to ruin the scene - perplexed, I discover that the precipitation is not coming from the perfect blue sky, but instead from my hiking backpack. Some frantic inspection reveals that a glass litre-bottle full of olive oil has smashed to bits in the midst of everything I own, dousing clothes and prized possessions alike. Why was I carrying olive oil? Why in a glass bottle? Why wasn't it at least wrapped in a plastic bag? All good questions without any good answers.

In the face of this calamity, I did the only thing I could - I threw back my head to the sky, and laughed. Laughed that I had been dumb enough to put glass and oil in my bag. Laughed that even though I was in Venice with hundreds of miles between me and anyone I knew, this was the biggest of my concerns. Laughed that while I would spend the entire day de-olive-oil-ifying my worldly possessions, I had the freedom to extend my stay in Venice to accommodate the setback. It was a beautiful moment that solidified the spirit of solo backpacking for me, but besides learning to roll with the punches, there are so many reasons to do a trip like this. My hope in this article is to convince you to solo backpack, and to make sure you know some of the things that I wish I knew going in. Not keeping a glass bottle of olive oil in your backpack is a good start.

Venice, where we lay our scene for the Olive Oil Incident [Credit]

Why You Should Solo Backpack

I was initially skeptical about solo backpacking. I had only travelled alone once before, and after only a day in Amsterdam wandering the streets, I found myself wishing I had others with me to share the sights and experiences of the city.

This most recent trip was actually inspired by that experience, because I wanted to challenge myself to see if I could enjoy making my own way through Europe. Within a week of starting my solo adventure, it was already clear to me why people who commit to this form of travel love it so much. Below are a couple of the best reasons to go solo backpacking, with some of them pertaining to the solo part, and others focusing on the backpacking part:

• You'll save a ton of money. All of the core costs of backpacking are incredibly cheap. Hostels start at $14/night (all prices in this post are in USD), groceries can be $15/day, and inter-city buses start at $20, meaning your base cost per day can reasonably be as low as $50 (this assumes you move cities every 4 days). From there, you can optionally choose to eat out, take nicer or more frequent transportation, or visit paid attractions. No matter how you choose to optimize your budget, you'll be able to keep costs low while experiencing a wide variety of places and cultures.
• You'll adventure with people of greatly diverse backgrounds. In my travels, the people I explored with, ate with and lived with were from 6 different continents, spoke countless different languages, came from incredibly varying socio-economic backgrounds, and had every job under the sun. I talked to people who worked long hours at minimum-wage jobs so they could leave it all behind to travel the world, and heard about people's dreams of becoming musicians or mathematicians. Youth hostels are a truly global community of people from all walks of life, and being a part of that culture is an invaluable experience.
• You'll learn to listen to yourself and do what it is you actually want to do. So much of typical vacationing is visiting some monument because you feel like you should or doing an activity simply because you trip-mates are doing it. With solo backpacking, all of that falls away. Each morning, you wake up and decide what you want to do with almost no limitations. Skip town and take a train into the mountains? Spend an entire day reading by a river? Get lost in the narrow streets of a medieval quarter? Traveling alone forces you to critically evaluate what it is you enjoy doing while abroad, and gives you the freedom to do just that.
• You'll gain confidence in adventuring with and befriending total strangers. Jumping from hostel to hostel means that you'll constantly be thrown into a new community and you'll have the opportunity to find new people with which to explore the city. Luckily, virtually everyone around you is trying to do just that, and I became much more confident in sitting down to eat with strangers, or chatting up a new friend on the street.

My Trip

To give you some context, I'll speak briefly about my trip. The solo backpacking portion of my summer was 38 days long and covered 14 cities in 8 countries, which worked out to about 2 or 3 nights in most cities. I went south to north in Central Europe, then flew to Italy and headed north through the Alps to Paris, and ended my trip with a flight to Iceland. I almost always stayed in hostels and spent most of my time visiting city attractions or hiking. To get a sense of what I saw, check out my trip photo album if we're friends on Facebook or the solo backpacking section of my trip spreadsheet.

Italy having sand beaches, castles on cliffs, and medieval quarters all in close proximity hardly seems fair

Planning Your Adventure

I mentioned that you'll learn a lot about yourself through this trip, and even before I left, I learned something important. I hate planning for trips. The thought of trying to decide what I'll want to do months in the future and thousands of miles away fills me with dread. Luckily for me, and perhaps for you, backpacking requires very little planning. Here are the few things that you will want to consider as you prepare:

• Think about how far in advance you want to solidify plans. Personally, I was very comfortable leaving my plans completely open. In each city, I had little idea when I'd leave and where I'd go next. With most forms of travel, you get punished financially for not planning ahead, but luckily bus and hostel prices are relatively stable with respect to when you book. This allowed me to ask around for recommendations, stay in cities that I loved longer, coordinate with others staying at my hostels and be flexible when all my belongings became soaked in olive oil. On the other hand, this meant that every couple of days I had to re-evaluate my trip and figure out what to do next. If this sounds stressful and you'd rather get all the planning out of the way up front, that's quite common as well.
• Leverage the wonderful world of apps. Whether you decide to plan ahead or on the ground, you'll want to check out two apps that make finding great attractions easy. The first, Trip Advisor, you likely already know and love for their huge database of tourist sites and reviews. Another one to check out which is less well-known is Google Trips. In true Google form, it has a beautiful user interface and plays nicely with other Google-family apps like Maps. These two apps give you a couple of ideas to get started with in any city, and from there you should find less-visited sites by exploring on your own or using other resources like the NY Times 36 Hours Guides.
• Consider traveling with data. In order to take advantage of apps like Google Trips, you should think about whether or not you'll travel with data. Many backpacking destinations like the EU have extremely cheap data (e.g. EU-wide pre-paid data for <$15/month), and I personally felt it was worth getting in order to have access to guides, translation dictionaries, maps and emergency services. This is certainly a trade-off, as constant internet access does take away some of the adventure of being in a foreign country.
• Beat the hoards of tourists. If you're not careful about your planning, you may end up spending a considerable portion of your trip waiting in line. Consider traveling in a shoulder season, which varies by country but is typically late spring or early fall. Additionally, you'll want to avoid the biggest attractions during midday, as their lines will be much more manageable early in the day or closer to dinner. Lastly, for the most sought-after attractions like the Coliseum or St. Peter's Basilica, consider buying a skip-the-line pass online, which can save you upwards of an hour for just a few euros.

The Louvre ft. some people who didn't plan ahead