Hey everyone, I’m brand new to Reddit (and loving it). I’m a 19 y/o male and just got back from my first ever solo trip. I have done some travel before but always with family and I didn’t have to do any work, the parents just planned and paid for everything. However this time I planned a trip much bigger than anything I’ve been on and it was almost entirely self funded. I flew standby on buddy passes- my uncle works for delta- so my airfare was cheap and very flexible. This trip also wouldn’t have been made possible without my German teacher showing me the eurail pass. I flew from Atlanta to Brussels. In Belgium I visited the American cemetery because I have a relative buried there from WWII. It’s about an hour and half train ride from the airport and very close to Aachen, Germany. After that I returned to Belgium and spent the night in a hostel. It felt very weird to do all this traveling by myself but I was getting along pretty well for the most part. I took an early train from Brussels to Paris where I spent the next couple of days. This part of my trip was kind of a bust. The only site I saw in Paris was the Eiffel Tower and my phone wouldn’t connect to the cellular network so I was very scared of getting lost. I didn’t find out until the night before I left that I can download a google map of the area to my phone. The main reason I went to France was to see the D-Day beaches. I thought this would be especially cool because I was so close to the anniversary of it so a lot of events were going on. However, I woke up from a nap I didn’t mean to take (damn jet lag) as the train was leaving the Bayeux station I needed to get off on. I ended up getting off at the next stop and getting poured on the entire time. It was still a cool place to look around and it was nice to see some American service members there. I hadn’t been able to talk to anyone outside the hostels since getting to Europe (native English, conversational Spanish, and basic German). Because of train schedules I wasn’t able to get back to Bayeux in time to see the beaches and it was still pouring down rain so I decided to head back to Paris. The next day I was on a train from Paris to Basel, Switzerland to visit a friend that lives in the area. Unfortunately, pretty much all of Europe was still finishing up school and taking finals so I wasn’t able to spend much time with her and her family. I spent one day in Basel and made my way to Stuttgart for the remainder of my trip. There I visited the Mercedes and Porsche museums as well as the Wilhelma and did some exploring. But this is where the trouble seemed to set in. After about three days I felt like I was running out of things to do. I know some people will think “It’s a vacation it’s a good time to relax!” But I feel the need to be doing something almost all the time or I feel like it’s a waste. I was hoping to get a good amount of German practice in but found it very hard to talk to people and some seemed to be very impatient when I tried speaking it. I spent about 6 days in Stuttgart before calling it quits and flying back to the states from Zürich. The last couple of days in Stuttgart were spent kind of aimlessly wandering around. My hostel was filled with youth soccer and hockey players (like 10-12 year olds) from other parts of Germany and really started to get annoying. I found it very hard to meet people as I saw very few other young people in the hostel. Everyone is my room was at least 35 it wasn’t at all what I expected. In Paris there was a Chinese guy my age who spoke English well and I was able to eat a couple meals with him but in Germany I didn’t have anyone. I am a little introverted but not antisocial by any means. Essentially I felt like I wasn’t gaining anything by being in Stuttgart and just spending money, so I decided to go home. I’m happy I had this experience of navigating Europe and living by myself but I became kinda lonely and feel like I missed out on some of the best parts of solo travel. I was wondering if anyone has had a similar experience and how they made it better. I am planning on doing more solo trips both domestic and abroad (National Parks, Mexico, Peru, back to Germany) and would like some advice from some of the far more experienced people in this sub! Thank you for your time! via /r/solotravel http://bit.ly/2XUKLex