Not every trip I have taken has been good. One of them was miserable, and I learned more from it than from any of the ones that went well.
I booked a week in Fuerteventura with nothing in it. No excursions, no plans, no schedule. A quiet week of resting, which is not something I had ever done on purpose.
By day three I was bored to the point of distress, and I could not leave.
The island was not the problem. Fuerteventura did nothing wrong. The problem was that I had planned a week for a woman who does not exist, and then had to spend seven days as her.
Why I Booked a Week of Doing Nothing
I was on the edge of burnout.
The people around me said what people say, which is that I needed to rest. Take a holiday. Do nothing for once. Stop filling every hour.
They were not wrong about the diagnosis. I am usually the woman with an excursion booked every single day of a trip, and I was running on empty. Rest was the correct prescription.
So I thought I would try something completely different. Book a quiet week, sit still, and see what it was like to be somebody who relaxes.
I remember thinking it sounded mature. Like the kind of thing a sensible adult does.
What the First Four Days Actually Looked Like
It was an all inclusive place, but not a typical resort. It was built more like a set of houses spread across a large site, with a central building where breakfast, lunch and dinner happened.
My apartment was fine. That turned out to be part of the problem. It felt like being in my own house.
I am not a pool person, so lying beside one for a week was never going to work. The organized activities were mostly for children during the day, with nothing much aimed at adults.
So here is the honest inventory of what I did for four days.
I walked circles around the site until I had seen all of it. I sat on the balcony, which is apparently something people enjoy, and I did it repeatedly to give it a fair chance. I did not enjoy it. I lay on the couch and watched television. I tried to read a book.
That is the entire list.
Lying on a couch watching television is not a holiday. It is something I could have done at home for free.
I Was Not Resting. I Was Stressing.
This is the part that surprised me, and it is the reason this trip was worth writing about.
I had assumed that stillness and rest were the same thing. For a lot of people they are. For me they turned out to be opposites.
Sitting there with nothing to do did not empty my head. It gave everything in my head more room. There was no input to occupy me. So the only thing available to think about was myself and my work. And the fact that I was burning a week of my life, and a chunk of money, on being uncomfortable.
I felt like I was wasting time. And underneath that was something worse, which was disappointment in myself for having listened to other people about what I needed.
I came home from that trip less rested than when I left.
There was a second layer to it as well. Every hour I spent not enjoying myself came with a running commentary about how I should have been enjoying it. Other people manage this. Other people would love this. What is wrong with me that a week of beaches and sunshine feels like a punishment.
That commentary is exhausting in a way that a full day of excursions never is.
Have you ever booked a quiet break and found yourself more wound up on day four than on day one? This is what that is. You were not doing rest wrong. You were given the wrong form of it.
The Part Nobody Warns You About
There is a version of this story where I got bored and simply went and did something else. That was not available.
The place was in the middle of nowhere. Nothing was within walking distance. There was no Uber, and taxis were either unavailable or priced in a way that made them pointless.
Car rental existed, so on day three I stopped pretending and went to book one.
Every car was gone until day five.
So I had two more days of the thing I had already discovered I could not tolerate. A solution existed. I just could not reach it. That is a specific kind of frustration and I recommend avoiding it.
This is the practical warning in the article, and it has nothing to do with personality. If you book somewhere remote, you are betting that your plan works. If the plan turns out to be wrong, you need a way out of it. Somewhere walkable, reliable transport, or a car from the first day.
I had none of the three.
Why I Waited Three Days
Looking back, the obvious question is why I did not act sooner. I knew by the end of day one that this was not working.
I stayed because I had told myself to give it a try.
That sounds reasonable and it is worth examining, because it is what kept me stuck. I had booked this trip specifically to attempt something new. Abandoning it on day one felt like proving I had not really tried. So I gave it another day, and then another, and I called that being fair to the experiment.
What I was actually doing was being loyal to a plan that had already failed.
By the time I stopped defending it and went to book a car, the cars were gone. Three days of giving it a chance cost me two more days of being stuck.
There is a difference between giving something a fair trial and refusing to admit what you already know. On day one I knew. Everything after that was politeness toward my own booking.
Day Five, and Then Day Six
On day five I got the car, and the week changed immediately.
On day six I did the thing that made the trip.
I went looking on TripAdvisor for anything I could book at short notice. Almost everything started after my departure date. One thing did not, so I took it without much deliberation.
A motocross lesson. Four hours, with the first hour spent learning to ride one.
I am crazy about anything with an engine, cars and motorbikes both, and I had never ridden motocross in my life.
It was the best day of the trip by a distance that is not close. Not because it rescued the week, although it did. Because it was the first day that felt like it belonged to me.
Nothing about that day would appear in an article about how to have a restful holiday. It was loud, physical, dirty and completely unrelaxing, and it did more for my burnout than four days of sitting on a balcony.
The Mistake Was Not Fuerteventura
I want to be clear about this, because it would be easy to read the story as a review.
Fuerteventura is fine. There was nothing wrong with the island, the apartment, the food, or the people. Somebody else could have had exactly the week I booked and come home restored.
I did not hate the destination. I hated the expectation I arrived with.
I had gone there to rest, decided in advance that rest meant doing nothing, and then failed to enjoy a single minute of it. The trip was never given a chance to be anything else, because I had defined success before I landed and defined it wrong.
A destination cannot fix an itinerary that was never designed for the person taking it.
I Planned for the Woman Everybody Told Me to Be
Here is the sharper version of what happened.
I did not plan that trip for myself. I planned it for the woman the people around me were describing. Somebody tired who needed to lie down. That woman was real in the sense that I was genuinely exhausted. She just was not me.
The advice was well meant and it was correct in principle. I did need rest. What nobody could tell me, including me, was what rest actually looks like for a person who is energized by doing things.
For me, it turns out, rest is not the absence of activity. It is the absence of obligation. A day of excursions I chose leaves me full. A day of nothing I did not choose leaves me hollow.
I could not have known that without booking the wrong week. Which is why, oddly, I am glad I did.
The Biggest Solo Travel Planning Mistake
It is not choosing the wrong country. It is choosing your trip based on somebody else's picture of a good holiday.
That picture is everywhere. It is in the advice you get from people who love you. It is in every image of a woman reading on a lounger with a cocktail. It is in an idea most of us absorbed without noticing. That a proper holiday is a quiet one, and that wanting to be busy means you cannot switch off.
So women book the version that looks correct rather than the version that suits them. Then they feel guilty for not enjoying it, which is the part that really costs.
The most useful question is not where you should go. It is what you actually do with a free Saturday when nobody is watching. Not what you wish you did. What you do.
Plan the trip for that woman. She is the one who has to be there.
I Am Going Back
This is the part that proves the point.
I intend to return to Fuerteventura and do it properly, my way. A car from day one, and a schedule full of excursions like every trip I actually enjoy.
Same island, entirely different week. That is how I know the destination was never the issue.
So, What Did Fuerteventura Actually Teach Me?
That I am not built for stillness, which was worth learning even at the cost of a bad week.
More usefully, that the advice everybody gives about rest is aimed at an average person, and there is no average person. What restores one woman drains another, and neither of them is doing it wrong.
I do not regret that trip. I regret only that I spent four days trying to be somebody else before I gave up and went to find a motorbike.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the biggest solo travel itinerary mistakes? Planning the trip for the person you think you should be rather than the person you are, and booking somewhere remote with no way to change your plans once you arrive. Those two combined are what made my week in Fuerteventura miserable.
Can a relaxing solo holiday become boring? Yes, and quickly, if stillness is not how you actually recover. I was bored by day three, and being bored on your own with nowhere to go is considerably worse than being bored at home.
How do I know what kind of traveler I am? Look at what you already do rather than what you aspire to. How you spend a free Saturday when nobody is watching tells you more than any quiz. If you never sit still at home, a week of sitting still abroad is unlikely to feel like a treat.
What should I do if I am bored on a solo trip? Change something immediately rather than waiting to adjust. My mistake was giving it three days before I acted, by which point the rental cars were gone. The earlier you admit the plan is not working, the more options you still have.
Should I copy travel itineraries from influencers? Use them for ideas about what exists in a place, not as a template for how your week should feel. Somebody else's perfect trip is evidence about them.
Is it bad to plan a busy solo trip? Not at all, if that is genuinely what energizes you. There is a quiet assumption that a proper holiday is a slow one. It leaves a lot of women feeling guilty for wanting a full schedule. A busy trip you chose is not a failure to relax.
If you are trying to plan a first solo trip and keep building it around what a holiday is supposed to look like, that is worth untangling before you spend the money.
Take the free 2-minute quiz and find out what is actually shaping the decision.
Jordyn