About Solo Travel by Design
Hi, I’m Katrina — a soon-to-retire higher-education leader, lifelong planner, and solo traveler building a retirement centered around slow travel, cruising, practical systems, and intentional living.
I created Solo Travel by Design to share the real-life side of that process: the budgeting, trade-offs, logistics, test-drives, and decisions that come with designing a travel-rich retirement.
This is not a fantasy travel blog. It is a real-time planning space for people who want more travel in retirement, but also want the numbers, systems, and everyday details to work.
Why I Started This Blog
Like many people approaching retirement, I found myself asking questions that felt bigger than travel:
- How do I prepare for retirement if I want to travel more?
- What does extended travel actually cost in real life?
- What happens to my home if I leave for weeks or months at a time?
- How do I balance freedom, comfort, and financial reality?
- How do I test this lifestyle before I depend on it?
I could find plenty of travel inspiration. I could find plenty of retirement advice. What I could not always find was a practical place where retirement planning, slow travel, cruising, budgeting, home-base decisions, and real-life logistics came together.
So I created the site I wanted to read.
Who This Site Is For
Solo Travel by Design is for people — especially women in midlife and beyond — who want a retirement with more freedom, more travel, and more intention, without ignoring the details that make the plan work.
You’ll probably feel at home here if you:
- want travel to be part of retirement, not just an occasional escape
- prefer comfort, planning, and realistic pacing over adrenaline
- are thinking through budgets, housing, health care, dog logistics, or travel systems before making a major change
- want honest encouragement without hype
- believe this next chapter should be designed, not drift into place
What You’ll Find Here
I write about the practical side of retirement travel planning, including:
Retirement Travel Budgeting
- baseline spending
- travel overlays
- real monthly costs
- housing and home-base trade-offs
- points, perks, and practical cost reduction
Cruise Cost Realism
- what a cruise really costs beyond the fare
- solo cruising trade-offs
- cruise planning tools and decision frameworks
- repricing, upgrades, casino offers, and itinerary comparisons
Slow Travel and Sustainable Pace
- how to test-drive retirement before leaving full-time work
- how to plan longer stays without burnout
- how to create a weekly rhythm that feels livable
- how to balance travel with real life
Everything here is grounded in lived experience, active planning, and honest evaluation — not fantasy, hype, or perfection.
A Bit More About Me
For more than 25 years, I’ve worked in higher education and workforce development, helping adults build new futures through planning, strategy, and opportunity.
That background shapes this site more than anything else. I’m a planner by nature, and I bring that same lens to retirement travel: not just where I want to go, but how to make the life around it work.
I am building this plan in real time. That means I share the exciting parts, but also the questions, costs, constraints, trade-offs, and adjustments that come with designing a flexible next chapter.
I am not a financial advisor or attorney, and nothing here is professional financial or legal advice. What I share is personal experience, practical planning, and real-time decision-making from someone actively building this life step by step.
Meet Bobo
Bobo is my happy travel companion, expert nature sniffer, and one of the reasons my retirement travel planning has to stay grounded in real life.
Travel sounds simple until you add dog care, driving days, safe lodging, routines, boarding, and the practical limits of life with a beloved pet. He is part of the reason this site talks so much about logistics, not just destinations.
What’s Next
As I move closer to retirement, I’ll be sharing more of the practical transition — including budgeting decisions, home-base questions, product tools, cruise planning, points strategy, and test-drives of what this lifestyle actually looks like.
My goal is simple: to build a retirement by design, not by default — and to make this space useful for others doing the same.
Start Here
If you are new to Solo Travel by Design, the best place to begin is the Start Here page. It will help you find the posts, tools, and planning ideas that fit where you are now.
You can also start with the free Retirement Travel Baseline Worksheet if you want to understand the real-life costs your travel plans will need to sit on top of.
Here’s to building a life that fits — not one that just looks good from the outside.