How I Met Two of My Best Friends While Travelling Solo – Traveller’s Tales

A stranger with the same name.

I was travelling solo to Madrid in October 2023 when I booked a day trip to Segovia and Toledo. It was a cloudy morning; the kind where you keep checking the sky, half-convinced it’s about to rain. It never did. Instead, the day turned out to be one of the most memorable of my life, though not for the reasons I expected.

At the meeting point, I noticed another solo traveller. We caught each other’s eye, but were both too shy to say anything. It was only when the tour guide arrived, and we started walking to the bus, that we ended up side by side and finally said hi.
We started chatting on the walk over, and somewhere between the meeting point and the bus, we discovered something that made us both laugh: we had the same name.

I’m Ioana, Romanian. She’s Ioanna, Greek. At the time, it felt like a funny coincidence, a good icebreaker. By the end of the day, it felt like something more.

 

Cobblestones, a castle, and coffee in the plaza

Despite the clouds, the atmosphere in both Segovia and Toledo was magical – cobblestone streets, the castle that inspired Disney, and the ancient Roman aqueduct still standing after two thousand years. We spent the whole day together, talking as we walked.
By the time we reached Toledo in the afternoon, we were both exhausted. When we had some free time in Plaza de Zocodover, we decided to grab coffee and something sweet. We made a good team from the start: she got the coffees, I queued for the treats — huesos de santo, a traditional Toledo sweet — since they were at different counters. We took everything to go and sat down on a bench in the plaza, and just as we settled in, the sun came out. It felt like the perfect ending to the day.

Sitting there with someone I had met only hours before, it felt completely natural — like catching up with an old friend. We talked about the day, about how glad we both were that we’d said hello, about our shared love of coffee. There was no awkwardness, no effort. It just flowed.

Why solo travel friendships form so fast

Something happens when you travel alone that doesn’t happen quite the same way at home. You have no social safety net, no familiar roles to play. You can just be yourself.
That day, I found myself opening up to Ioanna about something I hadn’t been fully honest about with people back home — how unhappy I was in my corporate job in New York, despite having “made it” on paper. She listened without judgment. She understood. I didn’t have to pretend or perform. I could just tell the truth.

I think that’s what accelerates the formation of friendships in solo travel. You are stripped of context — no mutual friends, no professional reputation to protect, no family expectations hovering in the background. And there’s a certain freedom in knowing that even if things didn’t click, you’d never have to see each other again. You stayed friends because you wanted to. Not because you had to.

We also only had one day, which made us both more intentional. We made the most of every hour.
What were the odds?

When we said goodbye that evening, we both knew we’d stay in touch. And then I remembered something: I already had a trip booked to Athens for December.
Ioanna lives in Athens.
At first, the shared name had felt like a coincidence. But this? This felt like something else entirely. What were the odds that I’d meet a Greek woman with almost the same name as me, just weeks before my first trip to Greece?
That December trip felt nothing like a normal holiday. It felt like visiting an old friend in her city. Ioanna and her friend Themis took me around central Athens on my first day — walking, explaining everything I was seeing, eating great food, drinking coffee (of course). It was effortless.

Meeting Themis

I clicked with Themis immediately. She has a degree in archaeology and dreams of becoming a tour guide in Athens, so she essentially gave me a private tour of the city — warm, generous, enthusiastic about every corner of it. Despite my being a complete stranger to her, she showed me the kind of hospitality that makes you feel you’ve known someone for years.
A month after we met, I was let go from my corporate job. I moved back to Romania and decided to go all in on my travel blog. Themis was also unhappy in her own corporate job in Athens at the time, and watching me take that leap — and seeing it work — gave her the push to start moving toward her own dream of becoming a tour guide.

It felt like I came into her life at exactly the right moment. Like these friendships weren’t just good luck, but something meant to happen.

Friendship across borders

It’s just two countries now — Romania and Greece. But distance has never felt like an obstacle. The three of us text almost every day on our WhatsApp group, do video calls every few weeks to properly catch up, and travel together a few times a year when we can.

Since that day in Madrid, we’ve been to Kenya together, and most recently to Tbilisi — where we squeezed into a photobooth and took the kind of silly, joyful pictures that say everything about what a friendship is. We can be ridiculous together, but we can also sit with the hard things and support each other through them. We know what’s going on in each other’s lives. We show up.
We already planned trips to Georgia, Armenia, and Prague.

A note to anyone travelling solo
I almost didn’t say hi. We were both too shy at the meeting point, both waiting for the other one to make the first move. It was only the accident of walking side by side to the bus that made it happen.
I think about that sometimes. How close I came to spending that day alone.

If you are on the fence about solo travel, or you are mid-trip and keep almost starting a conversation but talking yourself out of it, don’t. Say hi. Sit down next to someone. Accept the exhaustion and grab coffee, anyway. You genuinely never know who you’ll meet.
Ioanna and Themis became the sisters I never had. And it all started with a cloudy morning, a shared name, and a bench in a plaza in Toledo.

Author bio: Ioana was born and raised in Romania, lived in NYC for 14 years, and has since returned to Romania. She began travelling solo at 30 and has now visited 30+ countries. Ioana is a full-time travel blogger and content creator at  Solo Travel in Style blog.She loves to share practical travel tips, itineraries, and recommendations for fellow travellers. Her story and insights have been featured in The Daily Express, Euronews, Bored Panda, Yahoo, MSN and more. Find her on Instagram.