Voyages of Inner, Outer Discovery as More Women Travel Together

“I always wanted to travel. I just never got the opportunity,” says Geena Davis in “Thelma & Louise,” a movie about two girlfriends on a wild car trip that doesn’t end happily. Still, I love the film because it touches on two things that make my life worthwhile: travel and women friends.

In recent years, the two have become connected increasingly, as women head off together on voyages of inner and outer discovery. There are no statistics to prove that women are traveling with other women more--only anecdotal evidence, which I recently set about gathering, and found in full spring.

Traveling with lady friends has long been the recourse among older women who’ve lost their husbands but still want to see the world. And it’s obvious why any footloose woman temporarily without a mate or unable to pry her significant other off the couch would go hunting for a female traveling companion. But these days, women are taking trips with girlfriends for more positive reasons. “Increasingly, one of the freedoms women are giving themselves is to travel with each other,” say Karen Killebrew, president of Escape Artists Travel and Holtz Tours in northern California.

Helen Rees, a Boston literary agent, got into the habit of taking trips with girlfriends to Paris, Alaska and Tuscany almost by accident, between marriages, when she and a woman colleague went on a bike trip in South Carolina. “We fell off the bikes a lot, laughed, and came home with great stories, which, of course, we embellished. After that, it just became apparent that traveling with a girlfriend is fun.”

“Women play together well,” says Carol Rivendell, a psychotherapist who co-founded one of the most successful women’s tour companies in the U.S., Wild Woman Adventures, based in Sebastopol, Calif. But that’s not news to many of the women I talked with, such as a professional colleague who remembers an antic trip to the Far East she took with five women friends, shopping and eating all along the way, amassing mountains of luggage and dubbing themselves the “Gang of Six.”

Julie Danis, an advertising executive in Chicago, recalls the night a skunk visited the cottage she and seven pals rented on Martha’s Vineyard, rousting them all out of bed in their PJ’s. The next morning they went on a skunk hunt, which they gleefully videotaped.

Trips like these help women friends who live in far-flung places stay in touch and reconnect--particularly when dear friends grow apart as they undergo life’s various big transitions, like childbearing or the death of a loved one. Every year, Mary Clark, founder of a newsletter called Smart Woman Traveler, takes a trip with about a dozen high school friends who now live all over the country. They give their husbands the chance to come along, creating interesting dynamics when, from one year to the next, old friends show up with new partners. But Mary’s favorite trips have been those taken by the women only because “we’re looser ‘We fell off the bikes a lot, laughed. . . traveling with a girlfriend is fun.’

and more open without men around,” she explains.

Women who work together are finding different, but equally convincing reasons to take time off for a trip. For example, women executives say that it takes other women executives to understand the kind of stress they face in often male-dominated workplaces, and they can use a trip as a vacation from the constant need to prove themselves.

Marla Caplan, a senior partner at a large multi-speciality medical practice in Baltimore, has made a mission of organizing trips for women in her firm (dog-sledding in Maine, rock-climbing along the Potomac River and sea-kayaking on the Pacific coast of Mexico) because it helps them learn how to network and builds caring and supportive relationships that bear fruit back on the job. “When a colleague is ready to throw herself out of a kayak to help me, I know I can trust her to take care of the patients I refer to her,” she says.

Then, too, there is a subtler motivation for going away with girlfriends, if you believe that, as many psychological researchers say, women define themselves in relationships, while men tend to place a higher value on autonomy and self-reliance. Younger women seem less likely to identify themselves as adjuncts to families and partners, but those who’ve been married a while come to think of themselves as part of a couple. “Girlfriend trips are a way to reestablish your separate identity,” says Laurel Whillock, owner of Patterson Travel in Sacramento.

Whillock also has noticed that women seem more willing to try new things, like scuba diving, without men looking on. I have a friend who took a backpacking trip in the Mojave Desert with a group of women who’d all camped with men before, but wanted to see if they could do it themselves. Mostly, though, no one’s out to push the limits or prove anything on girlfriend trips, as evidenced by the popularity of spa and all-inclusive Club Med-style vacations among groups of women.

Shopping, cultural activities and eating are prime focuses of trips planned by tour companies such as Wild Women Adventures and the Florida-based Women’s Travel Club, while firms such as Adventure Associates in Seattle specialize in non-pressured wilderness trips, whale-watching in the San Juan Islands or hiking in the High Sierras, with horses to carry the gear.

Vacationing with friends isn’t always easy, of course, which is why women who do it often suggest talking things out during the planning stage, deciding on whether to share bedrooms, how much money to spend and what kind of pace to set. Groups of three can be difficult, as a friend of mine in New York has found, because almost invariably one person feels left out. But irritants like snoring, penny pinching and bathroom hogging can be negotiated, says Mary Clark. She recommends that each woman articulate what bothers her most, and that everyone else in the group makes a promise to avoid it.

“What do we live for,” wrote George Eliot, “if it is not to make life less difficult for each other.” In the end, this may be all the reason women need for taking trips together.

Wild Women Adventures can be reached at (800) 992-1322 or on the Internet at https://www.wildwomenadv.com. The Women’s Travel Club is at (800) 480-4448 or (305) 936-9669, fax (305) 937-7649; Adventure Associates, (888) 532-8352 or (206) 932-8352.

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This new column about women’s travel appears weekly. Spano, who joined the Travel staff recently, is a seasoned traveler who has freelanced widely. She will also write destination stories for Travel.