Paula Barnes has been living the expat life for close to two decades now, and if there’s one thing her story proves, it’s that confidence in travel isn’t something you’re born with — you build it, one uncomfortable moment at a time. She and her husband left Australia thinking they’d do six months in Taiwan. That was almost twenty years and three kids raised across Asia ago (which tells you something about how well any of us actually stick to “the plan”). Living that long overseas teaches you things fast — how to muddle through without the language, how to figure out systems nobody explained to you, how to settle into a new culture without losing track of who you are. For a lot of our listeners, her story is proof there’s no single “right” way to see the world — just your way, figured out as you go.
One thing Paula was refreshingly honest about is fear — specifically, the fear that shows up the second solo travel comes up, especially for women over 45. Even after two decades of moving countries, she says traveling alone can feel scarier than living abroad ever did, because you don’t have the home base and routines to fall back on. Her advice is wonderfully practical: start small and close to home — even just an hour away for a weekend — so you can practice navigating and making decisions on your own without also wrestling with a language barrier. From there, use guided tours as training wheels, not a permanent crutch. A walking tour or a short group trip helps with more than logistics — it helps with the social confidence part, too, because striking up conversation with strangers can be just as nerve-wracking as any airport.
Then there’s the part nobody really brags about: eating alone in restaurants. Paula admitted she used to just take her meals back to the hotel room — which, if you think about it, kind of defeats the whole point of going somewhere in the first place. What changed things was a small mental shift: eat a little earlier, while it’s still light out, grab an outdoor table if you can, and treat people-watching as a perfectly legitimate way to spend a meal. That one adjustment turned isolation into something closer to enjoyment, and from there it’s a short walk to feeling fine at bars, communal food halls, wherever conversation tends to just happen on its own.
Technology turned out to be a pretty useful bridge for a lot of this. Paula swears by TripIt for keeping every confirmation in one place — maps, timing, alerts when something gets delayed or a gate changes. WhatsApp, she pointed out, is basically the default way to talk to people in most of the world now, which makes it a lot easier to stay in touch with new friends or a travel group. As for AI, she uses ChatGPT for the quick stuff — restaurant hours, that sort of thing — and Claude when she’s actually building out an itinerary from research she trusts. Her caution is a good one, though: AI will happily hand you a beautifully confident day plan that has you walking eleven miles and catching a ferry that doesn’t exist. You still have to sanity-check the distances and the timing yourself.
Where Paula really got interesting, though, was talking about the places she encourages women to consider even if their gut says no — Morocco, Bhutan, Mongolia. Not recklessly, but with some smart precautions and the right support around you. Her approach to slow travel is simple: build in a free day or two before or after a tour, ask actual locals and expats where they eat, and just wander a neighborhood until you stumble onto the bookstore or the market you’d never see from a bus window. She’s also a big believer in volunteering as a way in — it builds real connections, not just souvenir memories. And in the end, she said, the real payoff of travel is always the same thing: the people. Meeting them is what turns confusion into context, and quick judgments into a little more patience. That’s true whether you’re an empty nester starting fresh or someone like Paula, twenty years in and still finding the next thing worth doing.
Click below to hear the podcast, and learn more about Paula on her web site. https://www.trulyexpattravel.com
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