Solo Travel After 50: How Kat Abrahams Found Her Way Back to Life

After losing her husband, Kat Habrams faced an unexpected turning point at 51: a solo holiday to Portugal, a spontaneous skydive and the discovery that life could still surprise her. Now 58, she travels the world alone, encouraging other women to embrace adventure on their own terms.

There is a moment in Kat Abrahams’ story when everything seems to come together. She is sitting in a hotel bar in Portugal, on her first solo holiday, when she spots a leaflet advertising skydiving. There is just one small problem: she is terrified of heights.

She has always wanted to try it, though. And, sitting there, she has a thought that will change the way she approaches life: if she doesn’t do it now, she never will. So she books it for the following day.

“I jumped out of a perfectly good aeroplane,” she recalls, still amused by the memory. “When I landed, I remember thinking, bloody hell, I’ve actually done that!”

For Kat, better known on Instagram as Goldie Pirate, the experience was about far more than ticking an item off her bucket list. After years of grief and the challenge of rebuilding her life, she had rediscovered a feeling she hadn’t experienced in a long time: excitement about what might happen next.

Now 58, Kat is a solo travel creator who helps women over 50 find the confidence to explore the world independently. Her latest adventure took her across the Philippines for three weeks, where extraordinary landscapes and the generosity of local people left a lasting impression. But behind the travel stories and beautiful destinations lies something more personal: a woman learning to make room for herself again.

The holiday that changed everything

Kat lost her husband after 26 years of marriage. Their daughter was just eight years old, and Kat suddenly found herself navigating widowhood, single parenthood and a future she had never expected to face alone.

For a while, life simply carried on. But beneath the everyday responsibilities, something was missing.

“I’d lost my husband, and although life carried on, as it does, I felt empty,” she says. “I was still grieving, still trying to find my feet, yet craving something to fill that void. I just didn’t know what.”

Four years after her husband’s death, an unexpected opportunity presented itself. Her daughter was invited on holiday with friends, leaving Kat with a week to herself. Rather than stay at home, she booked a trip to Portugal.

She was 51, and it was her first proper solo holiday.

There were long walks, new places to explore and the freedom to make every decision herself. But there were also difficult moments. One day, sitting in a quiet beach bar overlooking the sea, Kat began to cry. She was alone, emotional and still grieving. Perhaps she had been carrying more than she realised, and the stillness finally gave her permission to let it out.

“It really hit me. This was my life now. I was on my own.”

The realisation brought sadness and loneliness, but also a clearer understanding of the life she was learning to navigate. She was still a mother, still a woman who missed her husband, and still someone with a future ahead of her.

A few days later came the skydive. That leap into the unknown didn’t erase her grief, but it reminded her that she was capable of doing things she had never imagined herself doing alone.

Looking back, Kat doesn’t describe Portugal as the moment she suddenly became fearless. It was something much more valuable: a reminder that she still had a life to live.

You don’t have to be super confident to travel solo

Today, it might be tempting to look at Kat’s adventures and assume she has always been a confident traveller. She is quick to dispel that idea.

“I still get the wobbles, especially when I’m heading somewhere unfamiliar,” she admits.

Arriving in another country alone can feel daunting. There is nobody beside you to decide where to eat, which direction to take or what to do when plans go wrong. Every choice rests with you. But that independence is also part of the appeal. You can get up when you want, change your plans on a whim and spend an entire afternoon exploring somewhere simply because it catches your eye.

Kat’s advice to women who dream of travelling alone is refreshingly practical: stop waiting until you feel ready. “Don’t wait until you feel confident, because you might be waiting forever,” she said to CrunchyTales.

Start with something manageable, take yourself out for lunch. Spend a weekend away, book a destination that feels comfortable enough to explore without overwhelming yourself. There is no requirement to begin with a long-haul flight or a dramatic leap from an aeroplane. And there is certainly no need to be super confident. “You can be absolutely terrified and still have the most incredible time,” she said.

For Kat, confidence is something that grows through experience. You take a chance, navigate an unfamiliar situation and discover that you can handle more than you thought. The next time, the fear may still be there, but it no longer gets to make every decision.

A little island, a lot of perspective

Kat’s three-week journey through the Philippines brought one of her most moving travel experiences to date. On a tiny island called Onok, in Balabac, she found herself surrounded by clear turquoise water, white sand and a tranquillity that seemed almost unreal.

She had travelled a long way to get there. When she finally arrived, she stood looking around and started crying. This time, the tears were different.

“After everything life had thrown at me, I was standing on this beautiful little island on the other side of the world, having an experience I could never have imagined a few years earlier.”

She shared the moment on social media, never expecting the footage to reach millions of viewers. Yet it wasn’t simply the scenery that made the Philippines so memorable, it was the people she met along the way.

Kat was struck by the warmth, kindness and generosity she encountered, often from people who had relatively little in material terms but gave freely of their time, smiles and hospitality.

The experience reminded her that some of life’s richest moments cannot be measured by money or possessions. Sometimes, they come from a conversation with a stranger, a welcome in an unfamiliar place or the sudden realisation that the world is still full of unexpected goodness.

And sometimes, they arrive when you’re standing on a beach on the other side of the world, crying your eyes out for all the right reasons.

Getting older without having everything figured out

Kat has recently turned 58, and she is refreshingly honest about the realities of everyday life. She still works long hours, she has a mortgage, worries about money and occasionally wonders what on earth she is doing.

In other words, she hasn’t reached some magical stage of adulthood where every question has an answer and every decision comes easily. She believes this is one of the misconceptions surrounding getting older: the assumption that by a certain age, we should have everything sorted.

Kat hasn’t, and she’s learning to be comfortable with that.

Travelling alone has, however, changed the way she sees herself. When you’re responsible for your own journey, you learn to solve problems, recover from mistakes and adapt when things don’t go to plan. Every challenge you manage becomes evidence of your own resourcefulness.

She has also discovered that she genuinely enjoys her own company.

There is an important distinction between being alone and feeling lonely, she says, and one that many women discover as they grow older and begin to reconsider what they want from life.

Kat isn’t trying to become an entirely different person. She is simply giving herself permission to be the person she wants to be, whether that means swimming in the sea, exploring tropical islands or occasionally doing something completely ridiculous. After years of worrying about what she was supposed to do, she is increasingly interested in what she actually wants to do.

And there is something wonderfully liberating about that.

Life after loss: you can carry love and still move forward

For women who have experienced bereavement, the idea of finding happiness again can be complicated. Moving forward may feel uncomfortable, even disloyal, as though embracing new experiences somehow diminishes the person who is no longer there.

Kat sees it differently. “If you’re grieving, please don’t think that finding happiness again means you’ve stopped loving or missing the person you’ve lost.”

You can carry that love with you and still make new memories.

It is a message that extends well beyond travel. Rebuilding a life after loss doesn’t mean forgetting what came before, and starting again doesn’t require you to leave your past behind. There is room for grief and joy, uncertainty and excitement, remembrance and discovery.

For Kat, the first solo holiday didn’t make everything wonderful overnight. Difficult days and responsibilities remained, but the journey showed her that wonderful moments could exist alongside them.

That realisation is perhaps the most powerful part of her story. Sometimes, a new chapter begins not when the pain disappears, but when you allow yourself to imagine a future that holds something more than it.

Your next chapter doesn’t need anyone’s permission

Kat is keen to challenge the idea that solo travel is an indulgence reserved for wealthy, retired women with unlimited time and money. She is neither retired nor financially carefree, she works hard to afford her adventures, and travelling sometimes means making sacrifices.

She shares that reality because she doesn’t want other women to look at her photographs and conclude that such a life is beyond their reach. Perhaps you cannot spend three weeks travelling through the Philippines. Perhaps you don’t want to, your next adventure might be a weekend in a city you’ve never visited, a course you’ve always wanted to take, a career change or simply a dinner reservation for one.

The destination matters less than the decision to stop putting yourself last.

“I think women of our generation have spent an awful lot of our lives looking after other people, putting ourselves last and doing what was expected of us,” Kat says.

Caring for others is part of life, she explains,but it can be easy to lose sight of your own dreams in the process. Somewhere along the way, you may start believing that certain experiences belong to younger women, that it’s too late to change direction or that you need somebody else’s approval before trying something new.

Kat’s message is straightforward: you’re not too old, and you don’t need permission to reconnect with your playful side. You don’t have to reinvent your entire life in one dramatic gesture, you simply have to start somewhere.

At 58, Kat doesn’t know exactly what her next chapter will look like. And, for once, she seems perfectly happy with that uncertainty. “I don’t know exactly what the next chapter looks like. And to be honest, I’m quite happy not knowing.”

Then comes the line that sums up her spirit perfectly. “I’m not done yet!” Neither, perhaps, are you.

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