Certainly if you are an older woman contemplating solo travel in Europe for the first time, as I was not so long ago, you should give a little thought to health and safety issues.
Optimist that I am, I’m afraid that I didn’t do much, if any, of that in advance of my first trip.
I’ve done two long solo trips thus far, and may be on the third one as you read this. For the first two trips, I had a health-related issue. I’ll talk about those experiences here in a moment.
Leaving Most of Your Safety Concerns Behind When You Go to Europe
But first, let’s deal with safety issues because many newbies will think that’s even more pertinent and fear-inducing than health scares.
For the most part, you can put violent crime, such as you might experience in American cities, right out of your mind. It just doesn’t happen unless you are careless or just extremely unlucky. It’s safe to wander around well-lit streets at night by yourself, especially if there are other people around.
If you like to drink yourself into oblivion, it might be a slightly different story, but even then, my young hostel roommates said that the locals would laugh at them but not view their state as something to take advantage of.
So while the chance of crime harming your person is very very low, there is a different type of safety concern. Pickpocketing is alive and well in Europe, and those who engage in this lifestyle are extremely skillful.
My roommate in a hostel was a Norwegian woman who worked remotely and thus traveled throughout Europe much of the time. Toward evening she realized she had been pickpocketed. I asked her how and where it happened, hoping to learn something. She said she had no idea.
This reaction is a common one, I have learned, so just get rid of the notion that you will be able to stop a pickpocketing (or phone or purse snatching if you leave them exposed on a table, for instance).
Prevention is what is recommended to deal with thievery or scams that target your money, but not your body. In later articles to appear in this section, I’ll talk about prevention and awareness measures.
Taking Care of Your Health in Europe
Now let’s introduce health into the picture. On the first trip, I contracted a nasty virus or bacterial infection. I’ve never coughed like that in my life, except for the two times when I had pneumonia. Finally I had to miss an entire day of sightseeing in Berlin while I navigated the clinic system to get help on a Saturday. I made the decision not to take any antibiotics, which proved to be a wrong move. The violent cough continued day and night for the remaining 27 nights of my trip. When I got home, my primary care physician prescribed a typical antibiotic, but she said if I coughed even once after that, I needed to call her. After the first round when coughing persisted, she had to prescribe prednisone to get me back to normal. I’ll tell more about this in a future article.
The “lesson learned” is to be extraordinarily proactive about your health. To this day I’m convinced that my body encountered an invader that was not at all familiar.
The second trip was marred by a different health issue. I landed awkwardly on my knee while furiously weeding a slope in my front yard. Imaging showed nothing, so my doctor said it was a bone contusion and said I could go on with my trip when the pain and swelling subsided. I did fine for the first two weeks of the trip and then started having issues with the other knee feeling like it was going to buckle. For this article, I will just say that I limped along, literally, for a while until finally having to buy a cane early Sunday morning in Copenhagen. I missed the entire day of sightseeing on the previous day while figuring out what to do. I might write more about that episode too, because there is more to the story.
In short, pay attention to both your health and safety. Despite my two significant health issues, I enjoyed both trips thoroughly, and you can do that too.
As Older Women, We Just Have to Be Alert to Our Own Safety
As I wrote more articles for this section, the article’s name and link will appear below this. There are many more health and safety tales to be told, and when we enable commenting, you can chime in too.