I’ve always found that the US is one of the easiest places for solo travel — especially as a woman. When I was 21, for instance, I spent six weeks travelling from New York to LA on the Greyhound (the notorious interstate bus system is probably the least salubrious — and least comfortable — way to travel in America, but it is cheap).
Admittedly, the year before I embarked on that particular Stateside odyssey, someone had been decapitated on a Greyhound — a story that my American friends trotted out as a (very fair) warning of the dangers of bus travel in the US. With all the wisdom of a twentysomething in the first flush of independence, I figured that lightning rarely strikes twice and my chances of being decapitated were fairly low. And as it turned out, the Greyhound was great. Well, not ‘great’, it hellishly uncomfortable, but the American people I met (from an out-of-work truck driver to two Amish brothers with special dispensation to travel via bus) were unfailingly friendly.
