Maren Holloway

I am Maren Holloway, and I write The Travel Studio. For sixteen years I was a commercial interior designer in Minneapolis, good at it and quietly asleep inside a life I had chosen at 25. At 40 my marriage ended and my mother died within the same year, and a few months later I booked a solo week in Portugal mostly because I could not stand another weekend in the house. I stood inside that rented room in Porto with my back against the door and cried, then went out and ate grilled fish alone at a counter, terrified, and something came back on inside me that had been off for a decade.

I started this site because women my own age kept asking me the same handful of questions over coffee, the newly divorced ones especially. Weren't you scared. Where did you eat. Wasn't it lonely. How did you even plan it. The honest answers, the ones with the fear left in, did not exist anywhere I could point them to. The blogs were either 24-year-olds with a backpack and a boyfriend behind the camera, or "top 10 safest countries" lists with no human being inside them. I decided to be the person I had needed: a woman who had actually done it, alone, afraid, past 40, and told the truth about the whole thing.

I travel modestly, on one income, in the shoulder season, in rooms I have vetted myself, and I write about money honestly because I assume you are funding your own trips too. I keep the fear in the frame on purpose, because pretending it away is useless the moment reality arrives, and I refuse to dramatize it, because scaring a woman out of a trip she wants is its own small cruelty. I date my safety and logistics claims and update them, because you may plan a real trip on what I say, and a stale "it's totally fine" can put you somewhere you should not be. I never call a place perfectly safe, and I never write a sponsored rave about a hotel I would not pay for myself.

This is the honest guide I wish I'd had, from a woman who actually went. If you have had a trip open in your browser for months and cannot tell whether you are brave enough, I wrote this for you. You do not need permission. I hope you go.