The First Solo: A Fearless First-Timer's Guide to Planning Safe, Confident Adventures

John W Florey is a travel writer and safety educator with more than fifteen years of experience in travel risk management. He began his career coordinating international operations for a global nonprofit and then spent a decade training professionals for overseas assignments — the origin of his enduring belief that good safety practice is a set of simple, repeatable habits rather than dramatic precautions.

He spent three years researching this book, interviewing more than two hundred women who had traveled alone for the first time, from a nineteen-year-old backpacking Europe on a shoestring to a sixty-one-year-old taking her first solo trip after retirement. He developed the book with a panel of women travelers who reviewed every chapter, contributed their own stories, and held the manuscript to the standard it needed: practical, honest, and free of condescension. His own role in the project, as he tells it, was to make sure nothing in these pages ever required a woman to plan around fear.

Florey writes about independent travel for a range of publications and leads safety and preparation workshops for first-time travelers. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and two adopted terriers, and he remains convinced that the best advice any travel book can offer — to a woman or a man, on a first trip or a fiftieth — is trust yourself, and plan for everything else.