Even after I became an adult, I never gave up the idea of doing grand things and having solitary adventures. I’m not talking about racketing through the jungle in a Jeep in some backwoods of a Southeast Asian country that doesn’t have diplomatic relations with my country. I’m not even talking about going with a group on a guided tour.

I’m talking about being alone and brave on my own, doing what I like doing, as if I was a whole human being and not an elderly middle-class white woman. I’m talking about venturing into the world, instead of taking refuge in a fearful suburban dream.

I have gotten myself on public transit through all kinds of countries, mind you—took a city bus in the wrong direction in Berlin, got scammed by a driver in Italy, reached my hotel in Marseille by taking a bus and then a subway, and I have been on trains everywhere including Hungary, Russia, and Bulgaria.

It’s just as scary to fork out $13.50 for a senior citizen bus ticket on New Jersey Transit to go to my favorite resort, Cape May, all by myself. Just as scary to hope that the schedule online wasn’t lying, or that the big interstate bus that pulled up near the train station was going where it said it would. 

But here I am, sitting on the New Jersey white sand beach, listening to the deep cough of the waves and the plunk of paddleball, thinking about going into the water. And I got myself here, all on my own. 

And now that I’ve done it, I can do it again any time I want. Because now I can believe the bus actually goes where it says it does, and that the beach is still there, even though I don’t have a car, even though I’m the kind of little old lady that bus drivers say, as I am getting off, “Now you be safe out there.”