Cailin O’Neil’s solo flight

While the other kids were exploring the neighbourhood and
catching their favourite shows on TV, Cailin O’Neil experienced the
world on a bigger scale—and looked at it through a wider lens.

“My mother worked for an airline growing up,” she says. “I loved
travelling and making little films.”

Her mom, who received employee-discounted fares as an agent “working
on the gate” for Air Canada, has since retired. Now, the 25-year-old
O’Neil, born and raised in Halifax, is starting to edit footage for the
pilot episode of her own travel TV program called Travel
Yourself. The premise of the series is straightforward: it’s about
the joys, opportunities, challenges and lessons of travelling on your
own.

“It opens you up and gives you a chance to think about yourself,”
O’Neil says.

Going it alone doesn’t mean spending every minute of every day in
solitude. Rather, a solo sojourner, who doesn’t have to reconcile a
schedule or negotiate an itinerary with a partner or group, is free to
meet and hang out with new people and to follow the unplanned route and
enjoy the unexpected experience. The only person O’Neil has to
reconcile and negotiate with is herself.

“The filmmaker in me wants to have shot after shot planned,” she
says, “while the traveller in me just wants to go.”

O’Neil has met many solitary sojourners in her travels. “There’s a
lot of solo travellers out there,” she says, adding they stay in touch
with each other and have developed their own following via online
communications vehicles such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs. O’Neil is
building her own audience online and has just filed a guest post to the
blog solotravelerblog.com.

In the same way some people might hesitate before taking a trip on
their own, O’Neil wondered if she was taking on too much by committing
publicly to making a show when she didn’t have a commitment from a
broadcaster to air it on TV or an internet company to screen it
online.

Then she asked herself a simple question: “Why not just do it?”

She also found herself “out of a relationship all of a sudden.”
Breakups, getting dumped, have long been motivators for travel. For a
travel TV show? This could be a first.

Besides the emotional drive, O’Neil has credentials. A graduate of
NSCAD’s film program, she’s screened her film Forgotten at the
Atlantic Film Festival. These days, O’Neil works as an assistant
production coordinator, on a freelance basis, in Halifax’s film
industry. During downtime on the city’s sets and locations, she
travels, using funds she’s saved from film work.

This year alone, O’Neil has visited Cuba, the UK (England, Ireland
and Scotland) and Spain. Over the past year-and-a half, she’s gone to
16 different countries. O’Neil shoots during each trip, with an eye to
basing future episodes on her experiences.

For now, “I’m doing it out of my own pocket.” Things could
change—she’s talking to the Outdoor Life Network (OLN) and CTV
Travel. OLN carries one of her favourite travel shows,
Departures. O’Neil is also talking to internet TV producers too.
And, if it comes down to this, there’s always posting episodes to her
website travelyourself.ca or on
YouTube.

Listed on her website as host, producer and director, O’Neil hopes
to stay directly involved in Travel Yourself, if it’s
purchased—picked up—by a TV or online broadcaster. At the least,
she’d like to sell the concept and work as producer.

For now, she’s about to start work on the pilot episode based on her
time in Spain. She went there to experience and to shoot the Tomatina
Festival, basically a big food fight with tomatoes being tossed by
thousands, among other things. Cam Erais went as her camera operator
and director of photography.

“I didn’t have a budget,” O’Neil says. “I was just going with
it.”

She estimates she spent between $5,000 to $6,000 on the trip, which
included an excursion to Morocco on her own. O’Neil paid for Erais’s
airfare and most of his related expenses.

On a visit to a bullring in a hilltop Spanish town, the scene felt
familiar to O’Neil. A short while later, she realized it was the same
site in a photo from one of her mother’s holidays. Her mother played
the bull while a friend had unfurled his jacket like a cape.

This article appears in Sep 10-16, 2009.