Adventures in St. Petersburg
It's okay to travel just to spend some time with yourself
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I’m writing this from a hotel room in St. Petersburg. The Florida one, though it is fairly cold. I’m here for the Writers in Paradise writer’s conference. I wrote earlier about how I lucked out into spending 3 hours a day for a whole week in a room with Elizabeth Strout. Tomorrow, we’ll be workshopping my novel excerpt, which means I’ll talking to Elizabeth Strout about something I wrote. Yep. Amazing.
Obviously, I haven’t been to writer’s conference in a long time. That pesky Covid thing got in the way. I love traveling places by myself. I feel like maybe I’ve gotten better at it as I’ve gotten older. At this point in my life, I understand how to be intentional about my solo travel. What do I want out of this trip or experience?
Do I want to be all super-adventurous, trying all the cool restaurants and working up the energy it takes to go eat someplace by myself? Do I want to be extra-extroverted, extending my networks and making new friends? Or do I want to get a really nice hotel room and enjoy spending time in a space by myself, temporarily outside (or mostly outside) the demands of my day-to-day life? Do I want to go full introvert on this trip?
The lovely Roxane Gay made me realize that it’s totally okay to go somewhere and spend as much time as you like in your hotel room, without feeling guilty or like a failed traveler. A hotel room—a good one—is a beautiful thing. It is the ultimate room of your own. You can eat all the crap snack food you like. Leave your clothes wherever with no complaints (I do not—I’m very neat, but even this is a sort of pleasure, tidying after myself). With a good hotel room, you can make your own writer’s retreat and that’s sort of what I’m doing this week. Bonus points for warmer weather (eventually—it was mid-50s today) and that Florida light which is just…different. I don’t know why. It just is.
Still, I have had some adventures, even on my introvert trip. Waiting for my flight at the Cincinnati airport, I saw a young woman roller skating around the terminal. It was late, so there weren’t a lot of people there. She looked so happy and free and I wished I would have brought my roller skates, too. Okay, I don’t have roller skates and am probably too old to put my body at risk like that, but it was lovely to watch her. It was the stuff of fantasies, like From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (if you have not read this book, you should). Haven’t we all wanted to make the sterile space of an airport terminal our own?
When I got to the Tampa airport, I rode their roller-coaster of a tram to the rental car desks. Seriously, there was some acceleration and hairpin turns that made the Beast at Kings Island look tame.
I rented a compact car, but when I got to the lot, all the compact cars were gone. All that were left were…Teslas. I did not want to drive a Tesla (do you even call what you do in a Tesla “driving”?). But that’s what I did. And since last night, I have been educating myself on how to drive a Tesla.
The first challenge was turning it on. I had to flag down some people in the parking garage to figure that out. Then there was the shifting into Drive or Reverse. That took a YouTube video. The first night, I probably left the thing unlocked in the hotel parking lot because I was exhausted and figured a car that smart would figure out how to protect itself, right? I still haven’t advanced to opening the trunk. Please send help if I have to charge the damn thing.
There are other adventures. I took a wrong turn trying to get to my hotel and ended up driving by the Don CeSar, a hotel that is the stuff of my husband’s childhood fantasies (he grew up in St. Pete). While I was there, I thought I might as well check out Pass-a-Grille, which showed up on various lists of places to go while you’re waiting for Sanibel to rebuild (which we are).
They’re all the mildest sort of adventures, which is perfect. Sometimes it’s okay to go on a trip to be alone with yourself. To find enough quiet to hear your own voice again. It’s okay to travel just to get reacquainted with yourself.
I love this. I can’t wait to hear how it was to talk with E. Strout.
At one time I had no fear of traveling by myself. Not quite sure how I feel today. Course, now I’m an old lady,but as a young college grad I went to Europe by myself, making friends along the way. I was fortunate to meet a gay guy at the London airport… we clicked and did England together. Someday I’ll tell you about crossing into East Berlin thru Checkpoint Charlie by myself.