On March 26, 2015, Lauren Juliff was somewhere in southern Portugal — I know because she posted a single photo of a terracotta rooftop that morning, and her followers guessed it was Tavira. For anyone curious about how a seasoned solo female traveler actually spends a day — not the highlight reel, but the quiet, intentional hours between the Instagram moments — Lauren’s routine that day offers a detailed, honest blueprint.
Her day began at 7:15 a.m., not with an alarm but with sunlight filtering through wooden shutters. Lauren has written before about the importance of letting natural light wake you when you travel solo — it anchors you in place. She brewed instant coffee in her rented apartment’s tiny kitchen (Nespresso machines are for hotels, she once joked) and sat on the balcony with a Moleskine notebook. That morning, she wrote for twenty minutes: observations about the previous day’s walk along the Gilão River, the way the almond blossoms had started to fall, and a list of three things she wanted to taste before leaving the Algarve.
Morning: Slow Navigation by Foot
By 8:30 a.m., Lauren had mapped out a route — not on her phone, but on a paper map she picked up at the tourist office. “Paper maps slow me down in the best way,” she told a fellow traveler over breakfast at a pastelaria. She ordered a pastel de nata and a glass of orange juice, and spent forty minutes sitting at a counter watching locals greet each other. This, for Lauren, is the core of solo travel: you don’t need an itinerary when you can let a place unfold through its morning rituals.
Her three-hour exploration was unhurried. She walked through the old town, stopping to photograph a ceramic tile shop’s doorway. She bought a single hand-painted tile for €3 — a habit she maintains as a physical map of her journey. At 10:45, she found a public garden with a bench under a jacaranda tree and sat for twenty minutes, doing absolutely nothing. “I used to feel guilty for sitting still in a new city,” she said on her blog later. “Now I consider it the most productive thing I do all day.”
Midday: Local Food as Cultural Education
Lauren’s lunch was intentional. She avoided the tourist strip near the Roman bridge and instead asked a bakery employee where she would eat if she were off duty. The woman pointed her to a tiny tasca with four tables, no menu in English. Lauren ate grilled sardines with boiled potatoes and a simple tomato salad. She noted the olive oil — peppery, with a hint of artichoke — and asked the owner where it came from. He brought out a bottle from his cousin’s farm in Moncarapacho, and Lauren wrote down the name.
This kind of detail matters for solo travelers who want to eat well without a companion to share dishes. Lauren’s rule: order what the person at the next table is eating. That day, it was a cataplana of clams and pork, which she vowed to return for dinner.
Afternoon: Writing, Walking, and a Hidden Beach
After lunch, Lauren returned to her apartment for a proper writing session. She opened her laptop and worked on a post about the emotional logistics of long-term solo travel — the kind of piece that would later become part of her popular series on Never Ending Footsteps. She wrote for exactly ninety minutes, then closed the lid. “I’ve learned that forcing more words after my brain is empty makes the next day’s writing harder,” she explained.
At 2:30 p.m., she took a local bus to a beach she’d read about in a guidebook — Ilha de Tavira. The ferry ride across the Ria Formosa lagoon was a silent meditation. On the island, she walked the empty stretch of sand toward the nudist section (not to join, she clarified, but because that side was quieter). She swam for fifteen minutes in the cold Atlantic, then lay on her towel reading a paperback — The Alchemist, in Portuguese, even though she only understood half of it. “Reading in a language you’re learning is like slow travel for the mind,” she said.
For solo travelers, this part of the day is often the most challenging: being alone with your thoughts in a beautiful place without any task to complete. Lauren’s approach is to let the environment dictate the activity. If the beach is windy, she writes. If it’s calm, she swims. If she’s restless, she walks the shoreline collecting shells — which she later arranges on her nightstand as a temporary still life.
Late Afternoon: A Quiet Connection
Back in Tavira, Lauren visited a small ceramic workshop she had spotted on her morning walk. The owner, an elderly man named Sr. Vasco, let her try her hand at painting a tile. She chose a simple pattern of a fish and spent an hour under his guidance, not saying much. That interaction — no exchange of Instagram handles, no attempts at English conversation — was, for Lauren, a pure form of cultural exchange. “We just worked side by side,” she wrote. “He probably thought I was a strange tourist, but I think he liked that I didn’t ask to take his photo.”
She bought the finished tile for €5 and carried it back to her apartment like a trophy.
Evening: Dinner Alone, but Not Lonely
Dinner was at the tasca that the bakery employee had recommended, two hours earlier than the local dinner hour — she arrived at 6:30 p.m., when the restaurant was empty. The owner, amused, invited her to sit at the counter. She ate the cataplana she had coveted at lunch, with a glass of vinho verde. The owner’s wife came out and asked where she was from, and they stumbled through a conversation in broken Portuguese, Spanish, and English. Lauren learned that the couple had run the tasca for thirty-four years, and that their son now lives in Montreal.
As the sky turned orange, Lauren walked home along the river. She texted her mother a voice note — something she does every evening, a ritual that combats the loneliness of solo travel. Back at the apartment, she prepared for the next day by checking train times to Faro. She did not plan an itinerary. “I just want to see what happens,” she wrote on a sticky note and stuck it on the door.
What Solo Travelers Can Learn from This Day
If Lauren Juliff’s March 26, 2015, offers one lesson, it’s that a full solo day is not about filling hours but about attending to them. She ate slowly, walked without a destination, worked without pressure, and let people into her day at their pace. That balance — between structured writing time and spontaneous encounters, between being alone and allowing momentary connection — is the real skill of long-term solo travel.
For women considering their first solo trip, start with a day that mimics this rhythm: one morning exploration, one meaningful meal, one creative or quiet afternoon activity, one evening that feels like a gift rather than a checklist. The day does not need to be extraordinary to be transformative. As Lauren proved on that Thursday in March, the ordinary rituals — coffee on a balcony, a bus to a beach, a tile painted alongside a stranger — are exactly what make a solo journey feel like your own.
If you want to build a solo trip from the ground up, I wrote a detailed guide to planning your first solo adventure in Solo Travel Simplified: A Four-Step Plan to Your First Solo Trip — the same approach Lauren used to structure her early travels. And if you’re looking for destinations where days like this come naturally, I’ve listed five that consistently deliver the right mix of safety, beauty, and slow culture in 5 Destinations for Solo Female Travelers in 2015.
