Gloria Atanmo woke before her alarm. That was typical for her in the spring of 2015 — not because of anxiety or early flights, but because the light in Granada filtered through her apartment windows at dawn like honey through a sieve. She had been living in the Andalusian city for three months, teaching English part-time and spending the rest of her hours walking, writing, and learning to be alone without loneliness. Her blog, The Blog Abroad, was still young then — a growing archive of essays about solo travel, heartbreak, and the kind of self-discovery that only happens when you leave everything familiar behind. What follows is a reconstruction of one ordinary day in her life that May, pieced together from her published posts, social media traces, and the rhythms she described in interviews. It is not a transcript of a single diary entry, but a faithful composite of the habits and rituals that defined her world at that moment.
Morning: The Ritual Before the Screen
Gloria’s mornings in Granada started without a phone check. She kept her iPhone on airplane mode until she had made coffee — a strong Cortado from the stovetop Bialetti she had carried from the US. She lived in a small flat in the Realejo neighbourhood, a former Jewish quarter where whitewashed walls and bougainvillea made every street look like a film set. Her desk faced a window that opened onto a courtyard where a neighbour’s cat often sunned itself on a stone ledge.
At 8:30 AM, she sat down to write. Not blog posts yet — those came later, after editing and rewriting. First, she wrote in a leather-bound journal, a practice she had started during her first solo trip to Iceland in 2013. The journal was for raw material: observations from the previous day, fragments of conversation overheard at the market, the way the light hit the Alhambra at sunset. She believed that travel writing died when it became generic, and that the only cure was specificity. So she noted the exact shade of the tiles in the Arab baths (turquoise veined with white, like sea foam over marble) and the name of the spice that the man at the Sunday market sold from a burlap sack (pimentón de la Vera, smoked paprika that smelled like campfires and earth).
After journaling, she opened her laptop and answered emails from readers. In 2015, The Blog Abroad had a modest but loyal following — mostly women in their twenties and thirties who had found her through her candid posts about solo travel after a breakup. One email that morning was from a reader in São Paulo who asked how Gloria afforded to travel alone. Gloria replied honestly: she worked remotely as a freelance social media manager, saved aggressively, and stayed in hostels or rented rooms rather than hotels. She never promoted credit card hacks or get-rich-quick schemes. Her advice was practical: cook your own meals, walk instead of taking taxis, and choose one destination to explore deeply rather than rush through ten.
By 10 AM, she had written the first draft of a post about the emotional shift that happens when you stop traveling from something and start traveling toward something. She would edit it three times before publishing, then respond to every comment personally.
Midday: The City as Classroom
Gloria taught English from noon to 3 PM at a small language academy near the Cathedral. Her students were mostly professionals — a pharmacist, a retired architect, a university student who wanted to study abroad in Canada. She did not use textbooks. Instead, she brought articles about travel and culture, and asked her students to discuss them in English. That day, the topic was “the best mistake you ever made while traveling.” The retired architect told a story about missing his train in Barcelona and ending up at a village festival where he danced with strangers until dawn. Gloria listened and thought about how much of her own life had been shaped by wrong turns that became right ones.
Between classes, she ate lunch alone at a café near the Plaza Nueva. She ordered a tosta de tomate y jamón and a glass of sparkling water with lemon. She did not scroll through Instagram while she ate. Instead, she watched the people around her: a group of German tourists arguing over a map, a local woman buying flowers from a stall, an old man feeding breadcrumbs to pigeons. She had learned that the best way to understand a place was to sit still in it and let the city perform its daily rituals around you.
After lunch, she walked home through the Albayzín, the old Moorish quarter, where the streets were so narrow that she could touch both walls if she stretched out her arms. The climb was steep, but she never took the bus. Walking was her meditation, her exercise, and her primary method of research. She noted a shop selling handmade ceramics, a door painted the exact blue of the Mediterranean in winter, a cat sleeping on a windowsill with its tail hanging down like a pendulum. These details would appear in her writing days or weeks later, transformed into metaphors or scene-setting or simply proof that she had been present.
Afternoon: The Work of Building a Blog
Back at her desk by 3:30 PM, Gloria turned to the business side of blogging. In 2015, the landscape was different from today. There were no TikTok algorithms, no Reels, no sponsored story templates. Bloggers built their audiences through consistent writing, guest posts on other sites, and genuine engagement in comment sections. Gloria spent an hour responding to comments on her own blog and leaving thoughtful replies on other solo travel blogs she admired. She never used generic phrases like “great post!” — she referenced specific lines from the article and shared her own related experience. This was how genuine connections formed in the early independent travel media space.
She also worked on a collaboration with a small luggage brand that had reached out to her. The brand wanted her to test a carry-on backpack and write an honest review. Gloria agreed only on the condition that she could mention both pros and cons. She had learned early that her readers trusted her because she was transparent. She wrote the draft that afternoon, noting that the backpack was lightweight and comfortable but lacked a dedicated laptop compartment — a real limitation for a digital nomad. The brand approved the post without edits. That kind of trust was rare, and she knew it.
Evening: Community, Solitude, and the Long View
At 7 PM, Gloria met a friend for tapas at a bar near the Cathedral. The friend was an American expat she had met at a language exchange event. They ordered patatas bravas, boquerones en vinagre, and a bottle of local red wine. They talked about family, about the strange freedom of living in a country where no one knew your history, about the fear that they might never want to go home. Gloria was open about the loneliness that crept in sometimes — the way she missed her mother’s cooking, the comfort of speaking English all day, the feeling of being an outsider even after months in one place. She did not romanticize solo travel. She insisted, in her blog and in conversation, that it was hard and beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking, and that was exactly why it was worth doing.
After dinner, she walked home alone. The streets of Granada were quiet now, the shops closed, the tourists gone. She passed the Alhambra, illuminated against the dark sky like a storybook castle. She stopped for a moment and watched it. She thought about the women who had lived there centuries before — sultanas and servants, poets and prisoners. She thought about her own life, the choices that had brought her here, the ones she would make tomorrow. She did not take a photo. Some moments, she believed, were meant to be lived rather than captured.
Back in her apartment, she made a cup of chamomile tea and read a chapter of The Alchemist in Spanish, a dictionary beside her. She underlined words she didn’t know: atardecer (sunset), anhelo (longing), peregrino (pilgrim). She thought about how much of travel was translation — not just of language, but of yourself into a new context, a new rhythm, a new way of being. She set the book down, turned off the light, and listened to the sound of the city breathing outside her window.
At some point in the night, she dreamed of a train moving through olive groves, the windows open, the air smelling of salt and dust. She woke the next morning and wrote it down. That fragment would become the opening line of a post she published two weeks later, about how travel changes not just where you go, but who you become along the way.
What This Day Reveals About Solo Travel in 2015
Gloria Atanmo’s life in 2015 was not glamorous. She did not stay in five-star hotels or eat at Michelin-starred restaurants. She lived in a small apartment, taught English, wrote every day, and built a blog from the ground up with patience and integrity. Her day was quiet, intentional, and deeply connected to the place where she lived. That, more than any exotic itinerary, is what her readers responded to. She showed them that solo travel was not about escaping your life, but about building a life worth living — one Cortado, one journal entry, one honest conversation at a time.
For those who followed her early work, the lesson was subtle but powerful: the most transformative journeys are not the ones you plan perfectly, but the ones you inhabit fully, day by ordinary day. If you are planning your own solo trip and looking for destinations that reward slow, immersive travel, the Salzburg in Winter: A Solo Traveler’s Quiet Love Affair post on this blog offers a similar philosophy applied to a very different city. And for a broader list of places that welcome solo women with warmth and safety, the 5 Destinations for Solo Female Travelers in 2015 article remains a useful starting point even years later.
