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Table for one, cabin for none
Plus the freezer trick pubs have quietly used for decades.
Greg Sullivan
September 10, 2026 • Est. Reading Time: 4 minutes
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“But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”
― Daphne du Maurier
Happy Thursday. Today we're traveling alone, cleaning the toilet with ice, and eating turkey out of an aluminum tray. It's an odd lineup, but there's a thread: every one of these is about the stuff people do when nobody else is in the room.
Money
More travelers are ditching the plus-one, and the industry is scrambling to catch up.
When it’s time to travel, we know what we’re bringing: luggage, clothes, tickets, passport and, of course, a travel companion. Right? Maybe not. In 2026, 26% of travelers said they planned to travel alone, while searches for “solo travel” hit an all-time high.
The problem is that much of the travel industry still assumes you brought a plus-one. As Peter McGraw explains, hotels, cruises and tours have long been built and priced around pairs, sometimes leaving solo travelers to pay extra simply for showing up alone.
Now that assumption is starting to crack. Cruise lines are rethinking cabins, hotels are designing tiny rooms for one, and travel companies are figuring out that going solo doesn’t necessarily mean wanting to be alone. The question is whether an industry built for two can redesign itself fast enough for the party of one.
GOOD reader Hannah Price sent this image of a maneuver called Splash and Dash taking place on the Colorado River at Parker, Arizona. Those baskets are wicker, aren’t they? Keep those feet dry!
An important correction:
In yesterday’s issue, I shared a lovely image of a pond that reader Linda Warren shared. It included some water birds, and I asked whether that technically made it a picture of a duck pond. GOOD readers Faith (no last name given) and Kimberly Swise each wrote in to point out that for it to be a duck pond, those would have had to be ducks. They were, in fact, Canada Geese! Or as my friends in Letterkenny might say, Canada Gooses. I regret the mistake and will strive to do better in the future.
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How do you feel about traveling solo?Home is behind, the world ahead. |
And what did we learn?
As a devout Trekkie myself, I had to ask: Who is your captain? This was a poll, not a quiz, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and say you got this one right! 44.6% of you chose the impressively bald, ever-wise, French-accent-challenged Jean-Luc Picard.
Kirk. Shoot first, monologue after. (22.3%)
Picard. Tea, Shakespeare, and a devastating speech. (44.6%) 🖖🏻
Sisko. Ran a war and still made dinner. (3.6%)
Janeway. Got everyone home. Do not test her. (20.5%)
Someone else (share your answers).(8.9%)
But (and I put that last option in there on purpose for just such a result) a surprising number of you showed up in the write-in section for a captain who is not from a serialized TV show, but rather from cereal itself. There were quite a few votes for the noble Captain Crunch!
And Nu Trek got a shout-out as well. GOOD reader (and I’d wager fan of magnificent space hair-dos) mdkelleher put in for the first-ever captain who happens to also be the most recent. “Captain Pike - Anson Mount's portrayal embodies an element of each of the four other captains--Kirk's heroism, Picard's cerebral tendencies, Sisko's patience and Janeway's problem solving.” Absolutely agreed.
Health | Courtesy of Upworthy
 | ||
Neurologist shares a 10-second hand test that can help determine if someone has dementia | ||
What can your hands reveal about your brain? | ||
By Tod Perry | ||
Humans are living longer and longer, which is generally a good thing. One of the downsides of that fact, though, is that more will eventually get dementia. The percentage of people with Alzheimer’s increases with age, affecting 5% of those from 65 to 74, 13% of those aged 73 to 84, and a third of people 85 and older. | ||
One method doctors use to assess whether people have dementia is the Luria test, which is highly effective and simple to administer. Alexander Luria, a Soviet neuropsychologist, created the test as part of a battery he used on soldiers returning from World War II. In a recent viral TikTok, Dr. Adnan Husein, a neurologist and fellow physician at UCLA Health, explained the test. | ||
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Ideas
A weirdly satisfying use for that bag of forgotten freezer cubes.
We've got a tip to make your least favorite chore actually cool. Stay with us.
Writer Erik Barnes reports on the cleaning hack lighting up CleanTok: dump a bowl of ice into the toilet, pour your usual cleaner over the top, wait fifteen minutes, scrub, and flush. The ice gives the cleaner something to cling to instead of sliding down the drain, and pulls double duty as a gentle abrasive on the way out. It's also why pubs and stadiums keep a layer of ice in the urinals.
Before you raid the freezer, though, a couple of don'ts are worth knowing. One of them involves the cleaner under your sink, and getting it wrong is the kind of mistake that sends you to the ER.
On September 10, 1953, Swanson introduced the TV Dinner: turkey, cornbread dressing, peas, and sweet potatoes tucked into a compartmentalized aluminum tray and marketed to a nation increasingly gathering around the television set.
The idea was a runaway hit, selling more than 10 million meals the next year and helping make dinner faster, easier, and decidedly more couch-friendly. Whether humanity eating Salisbury steak six feet from the TV counts as a triumph of modern convenience is… open to interpretation.
Either way, the TV Dinner changed how millions of people ate and proved that sometimes the future arrives frozen, foil-covered, and ready in 25 minutes.
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Until tomorrow, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying The Daily GOOD solo, but if you’d like, we don’t mind you forwarding it along.