Lettie Goes Travelling

I have recently returned from a week exploring an area of Italy I have never visited before – Puglia.

It wasn’t my ‘normal’ holiday, this was an organised ‘solo travellers’ holiday. It was a busy schedule – but fitted my purpose of seeing as much of the area in a week as possible.

My first shock was the size of the group – 30 people, plus the ‘Holiday Director’. 27 women and three men.

I visited some beautiful towns and cities, say amazing architecture, ate some good food and made lots of connections.

But I was also quite taken aback by one common theme which seemed to touch the majority of my fellow travellers – their lack of confidence, lack of belief that they ‘had this’. If I’m being honest I was shocked.

This lack of confidence manifested itself in different ways across the week.

It started as we were taxi-ing in, a quiet murmur of what would passport control look like, did we have to register for the e-gates.

And as we disembarked from our coach at the terminal, one lady touched my arm and asked ‘Please can I go through with you? Will you stay with me, help me get through this?’ and of course I did.

I had been sat on the same row on the flight over and she had seemed full of confidence, talking about various trips she had been on. She appeared self assured, opinionated and happy to be on holiday. But confronted with the passport scanning machine this was replaced with sheer panic.

Another example was towards the end of the week, a lovely lady, a recently retired Deputy Head, head of drama at a high school shared that she had felt uncomfortable and uneasy for the whole week and wouldn’t be going away again – on her own or with anyone else.

We talked it over and I used a food analogy… one bad meal doesn’t stop you from eating every again. There are lots of different holidays and experiences out there, you just need to find the one that suits you.

Another lady had run local government departments, been responsible for significant budgets, but again expressed that she couldn’t imagine travelling independently, she needed to know that someone else was in control of the schedule, the logistics – someone had her back.

And then finally there were the widows.

Recently bereaved widows, still navigating all the ‘firsts’ — first trip abroad, first airport, first holiday without their partner. For them this wasn’t just a holiday, it was an emotional milestone.

But there were also widows whose loss was much further behind them. And even then there seemed to be two very distinct groups. Those who had gradually learned to take control of things themselves… and those who still felt uncomfortable being the person responsible for the decisions, the logistics, the unknowns.

It made me realise that confidence is often far more situational than we think it is.

You can be highly capable, intelligent, experienced and successful in one area of life… and still feel completely out of your depth somewhere unfamiliar.

Many of these women had spent decades managing careers, households, finances, teams and families. But once familiar structures disappeared — work, marriage, routines, roles — their confidence often seemed to disappear with them.

And I came away from Italy thinking perhaps this isn’t really about travel at all.

Perhaps it’s about trust.
Trusting yourself.
Trusting that you can cope.
Trusting that you will figure things out.

And maybe that’s something many of us lose along the way without even realising it.

Something I’ll explore more in my next blog.