What I Packed for Solo Travel at 55: My Istanbul Wellness Edition

Last Updated on June 29, 2026 by Rebecca Huff

A real packing list, a typical day in the old city, and what I learned about traveling slowly, sleeping well, and trusting myself in midlife.

I woke up to the call to prayer.

Every morning in Istanbul, I slept with the hotel window open just so I could hear it. Five times a day, the muezzin's voice would come over the rooftops, and somehow, the first one of the day became my alarm clock. Not jarring. Not even loud. Just a soft, steady reminder that I was very far from Tennessee.

I took a solo trip to Istanbul for my birthday this past May. It was my first time in Türkiye and I was honestly just a little nervous about it. Not knowing the language. Eating alone. Walking 20,000 steps a day in the heat, with feet that hurt more often than not.

I came home with a life story. A packing list that genuinely works. A travel rhythm that protected my sleep and my digestion and (I think) my soul. And a few lessons I'd love to save you the trouble of learning the hard way.

If you're a woman over 40 thinking about a solo trip, especially to somewhere warm, walkable, and old (think cobblestones), this post is for you.

A Typical Day in Istanbul

Before I suggest what to pack, let me tell you what the days actually looked like. Because the right packing list depends on the right pace, and slowing down was the single best decision I made.

I'd wake up naturally to that first call to prayer, usually around sunrise. The hotel I booked was small and budget-friendly, which is what let me stretch the trip longer than a fancier place would have. Breakfast was included, which I ate slowly, lingeringly, drinking tea, watching other travelers come and go.

Then, this is a tip nobody puts in travel guides: I'd use the hotel bathroom before going out. In a city where you'll spend the whole day walking, knowing where your next restroom is becomes a real form of wellness planning.

After breakfast, I'd go visit the cats.

If you've never been to Istanbul, you might not know that the city has thousands of stray cats and dogs, and the entire culture takes care of them. They are loved. They are fed. They are spoken to like old friends by strangers in every neighborhood. I'd find a local park, sit on a bench, and quietly visit with whichever cats decided to come over. I kept a small brush in my bag for them. Often, I brought them something to eat. It was the most grounded part of my morning.

I traveled slowly on purpose. One thing per day. Just one. The Blue Mosque on Monday. Hagia Sophia on Wednesday. The Grand Bazaar on Friday. If I tried to see two things in a day at 55, I knew I'd come home wrung out instead of restored. Slow travel was the wellness practice.

Lunch is fine alone, usually at a small restaurant with a window seat. (Eating alone in another country is one of the more freeing things I've done in years. Nobody knows you. Nobody cares. You can just be the woman in the window with the tea and a Kindle.)

Afternoons were for people-watching, usually from a park bench with another tea, occasionally chatting with a stranger if the moment was right. Mid-day, I'd take public transportation back to the hotel and rest. Genuinely rest. Lying down, shoes off, window open, an hour of quiet before going back out.

Evenings were for dinner in places tourists didn't know about, hopefully. Usually fish. Usually somewhere I'd noticed on the way somewhere else and tucked away for later. After dinner, I'd find a place to sit and knit. A tea shop. A coffee shop. The hotel lobby. A park bench at golden hour. Knitting is the way I'm in the world.

Then back to the room. An audiobook on Audible. Window cracked. Sleep.

Twenty-thousand steps a day. Lots of fresh vegetables. Lots of tea. A hand fan in my bag for the heat. No macro-tracking. No spreadsheets. Just slow, paying attention, taking care of myself in a way that travel often makes difficult.

The Wellness Packing List

Here is what I actually packed and what I'd pack again. Organized by what each thing protected. (Skip to the sections that matter most to you.) You can take a look at my Solo Travel Must Haves on my Amazon Storefront.

For Sleep

If you remember nothing else from this post, remember this: protect your sleep more carefully when you travel than you do at home. Strange beds, time changes, late dinners, ambient noise, all of it stacks up. The traveler version of my bedtime routine was small but non-negotiable.

• A silk or satin pillowcase. Hotels have whatever pillowcase they have. Your hair and your skin deserve better. It rolls up to nothing.
• An eye mask. Heavier than you think you need. The good kind that blocks light completely. Worth the suitcase real estate, for both the plane and hotel.
• Magnesium glycinate. I take it at home, so I took it traveling. The form matters. Citrate is for digestion. Glycinate is for sleep.
• Ozlo Sleepbuds. I am not affiliated with Ozlo (yet), but I will tell you these changed sleep for me (perfect if your partner snores, or you are in a hotel near a train track or busy city.) They play sound that masks ambient noise without the bulk of headphones. If you've ever lost a night's sleep noise, they're worth looking at.
• An Audible book. I fall asleep to one almost every night at home. Doing it on the road kept my brain in the same falling-asleep groove.
• An opened window. Free. Brought the call to prayer to me. I'd do it again.

For Digestion

Travel is hard on a midlife digestive system. New food, weird water, irregular meal times, and a body that doesn't bounce back from any of it the way it did at 30. I packed for digestion the way other people pack for the gym. (My must have list on Amazon is here.)

• Digestive enzymes. I take them at home with full meals, and I took them with full meals on the road. Not for snacks. Just for actual sit-down food, especially fish or anything fried.
• Electrolyte powder. Plain hot weather plus 20,000 steps a day plus wine at dinner is a recipe for feeling terrible by day three. A scoop in water in the morning kept me even.
• A reusable water bottle. Refilled it at the hotel before going out each day. (Skip the tap, even where it's said to be safe. Just not worth the gamble on a short trip.)
• Fresh vegetables at every meal. Easier in Turkey than almost anywhere I've been. The mezze culture means a table of small vegetable dishes is normal, not a special order.

For the Heat and the Walking

Twenty thousand steps a day in Mediterranean heat is genuinely athletic, and I am genuinely not. What saved me was preparing for it like a small sport. All of my recommendations are here.

• One pair of cushioned sneakers, I chose Hoka Bondi 9 to protect against impact. Broken in before the trip. Non-negotiable.
• One pair of Blondo waterproof side-zip boots. Cute, comfortable, kept me dry on rainy days. The kind of shoe you can wear with a dress or jeans, which mattered more than I expected.
• A handheld folding fan. Sounds small. It's not. On the metro, in a museum line, sitting at lunch with no breeze, the fan was the difference between fine and miserable.
• A wide-brimmed packable hat. Sun on a 50-something face is not your friend.
• A lightweight scarf. Doubled as a mosque cover (women cover head and shoulders to enter), a sun cover at noon, and a pillow on the bus when I needed one. Pick one in a color you like and use it ten ways.
• Quick-drying clothes in light colors. Mine packed flat and dried overnight on the hotel chair.
• A crossbody bag with a zipper. Not optional. Istanbul has the same opportunistic pickpocketing as any major city, especially around the big tourist sites. Keep your phone and wallet zipped and in front of you.

For Hair and Skin

Travel destroys hair. Hard water, different climate, no time for a real routine. Two products solved most of it for me.

• Morrocco Method shampoo and conditioner bars. The single best travel hair decision I made. Solid bars are not liquid, which means TSA won't remove them. They lasted the whole trip plus weeks at home. They're the same formula I use at the house, so my hair never had the ‘what is this water doing to me' meltdown that usually happens by day four. (Use code ORGANICMOM for 25 percent off if you want to try them.)
• A tinted mineral sunscreen for my face. Daily. Reapplied at lunch. The single biggest favor I do for my future face on any trip.
• A small bottle of moisturizer I already trust. Travel is not the time to try a new product.
• A lip balm with SPF. The forgotten essential.

For the Soul

This is the part most packing lists skip. I think it's the most important part.

• A small Polaroid camera. I take a few good polaroids per day instead of having my phone out constantly. The photos are worse and better. Worse in resolution. Better in presence.
• My knitting. A small project in a zip pouch. I knit on park benches, in cafes, in the hotel lobby. It is the way I'm in the world. If you have a craft, take a small version of it.
• An audiobook downloaded for the flight and for falling asleep.
• A real notebook. Paper. Pen. A few pages a day, just to have a record.

Pack one thing for your nervous system. Whatever yours is.

The Pera Palace Night (and What I'd Pack Now)

Here is the one thing I'd do differently. It's the same mistake I make every time I travel abroad.

I had booked a really decent budget friendly hotel for the whole trip on purpose. (Cheaper room equals longer trip. Trade I'd make again.) But midway through, I decided to splurge for one night at the Pera Palace Hotel. If you don't know it, the Pera Palace is over a century old, was where the Orient Express passengers used to stay, has hosted Agatha Christie, and Ernest Hemingway, and most of European literature's twentieth century. Room 411 has Agatha Christie's name on the door. (Watch Midnight at the Pera Palace on Netflix… or one of the other 13 shows that ruined me for everything else.)

I was in room 615. The hotel is beautiful. Pink marble, brass elevators, a bar called Orient Bar where I drank a cocktail called the 1892. I sat there alone in my super casual traveling clothes I'd been wearing all week, and I felt extremely underdressed.

So at dinnertime, I walked to a local shop, bought a simple blue blouse, and went down to dinner. It worked. But it was the kind of last-minute fix I'd rather not need next time. More on why I loathe clothing shopping in the future.

If I were packing for that trip again, I'd bring exactly one elegant piece. Not a whole outfit. One piece, packable, that could turn the same pants into evening clothes. A lightweight, almost sheer blouse. Or, even better, a wrap dress. Something that takes up practically no suitcase space, weighs almost nothing, and means you can walk into a hundred-year-old hotel bar at golden hour without feeling like you wandered in by accident.

This is the lesson: you can pack as light and as budget-friendly as you want, and still leave one square inch of suitcase for one thing that says you took yourself seriously.

The Three Things I Won't Travel Without Now

Out of everything on that list, three things earned permanent suitcase status.

One. The shampoo and conditioner bars. They solved hair, TSA, and travel weight in one move. They will be in every suitcase for the rest of my life.

Two. The hand fan. It costs almost nothing. It changes everything in heat. (You'll be glad you have it in a stuff train or on the metro!)

Three. The polaroid camera. Not because the photos are technically good, but because picking up the polaroid instead of the phone changed how I was in the city. Slower. More present. Choosier about what I framed. I came home with physical photos that I’ll cherish. Every one of them is a moment I remember.

A Note on Traveling Alone in Your 50s

I want to tell you something that nobody told me before I started traveling alone a few years ago.

Eating alone in a new country is not the hard part. Walking alone is not the hard part. Sleeping in a strange hotel is not the hard part.

The hard part, if you're married and you've raised children, is learning to enjoy your own company. Three decades of being needed builds a particular kind of muscle memory, and that muscle doesn't know what to do with a whole afternoon that belongs only to you. It takes practice. It takes a few trips. It takes sitting in a park in Sultanahmet with a tea and realizing that the quiet you're feeling is not loneliness, it's just unfamiliar.

And then, somewhere in the middle of a trip, the quiet turns. You realize you might be your own best travel companion.

There's still a small ache when you see something beautiful and have no one to turn to and say wow, look at that. I won't pretend there isn't. My workaround in Istanbul: I'd notice a couple trying to take a selfie at a viewpoint, walk over, and offer to take their photo on my polaroid camera. They kept the polaroid. In exchange, they then took a photo of me with the polaroid. Fair trade. (Try it. It works every time, plus you might make a new friend.)

Traveling solo is a self-care project as much as anything else I write about on this blog. Sleep, hair, digestion, grounding, and learning to enjoy your own quiet company. They all belong in the same conversation.

If you are a woman over 40 who has been thinking about a solo trip and waiting to feel ready, I'm going to gently tell you that the readiness comes after, not before. You pack the things that protect your sleep and your digestion and your skin, you put on good shoes, you take care of your body the way you'd want a friend to take care of hers, and you go.

The trip will hand you back to yourself.

Not perfect. Just one better.

Before You Go

If sleep is the part of travel that worries you most, you might like my free Midlife Sleep Reset. It's the same protocol I used on this trip and use at home, written for women whose sleep got complicated somewhere after 40. Grab it here.

And if you want the full curated travel wellness kit in one place, the eye mask, the silk pillowcase, the digestive enzymes, all of it, it's on my Amazon storefront under Midlife Travel Must Have Items.

One more thing. If you're a woman over 40 who has been quietly thinking about a solo trip, I'd love to know where you're dreaming of going. Drop it in the comments on my Instagram and tell me there. I want to know.

Have a good trip. Take a small brush for the cats.

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