“Off-the-beaten-path”
Everyone says it.
Most people don't mean it.

There's an apartment in a suburban neighborhood in India, not a place where tourists go, but where normal families live. A mother, her daughter, and a grandmother who had probably never once considered that strangers from across the world would end up sitting on her living room floor eating her food.

But there we are. Every year.

She moves the furniture around to make room for us. Her daughter helps her lay out the ingredients. Her granddaughter translates when we're chatting, though honestly the grandmother doesn't need words -- she just smiles at us the whole afternoon like this is completely normal and also the best thing that's happened all week.

The mom teaches us the recipes that were passed down for generations. We cook, we eat, we talk about our lives and ask about theirs. We stay longer than we planned because nobody wants to leave.

That's it. That's the experience. No landmark, no Instagram moment, no ticket required.

It's also the thing our travelers (and our hosts) talk about for years.

This is what off the beaten path means to us.

It means choosing people over landmarks. Spending our dollars with family-owned businesses, women-run cooperatives, and communities that the travel industry mostly ignores. Showing up somewhere genuinely curious -- and letting people be equally curious about us.

When you travel that way, doors open that aren't on any map. And of course we still go to the Taj Mahal, but we also visit a cafe run by acid attack survivors afterwards. Because we want to see a country, sure. But we also want to experience it.

I built SoFe around this. Every destination we choose, every experience we put on an itinerary, every local partner we work with -- it all comes back to the same question: are we going deep, or are we just going?

There's only one right answer for us.

xo,
Amanda
Founder of The Solo Female Traveler Network