Just reading your post - some of which I've quoted above - and thinking back over all the trips I've done got me wondering whether the solo or the group trips were the ones I enjoyed the most. I've been fairly lucky in that there's only been a few trips where my group travelling companions have been, well, lets call it ... incompatible to the point where something had to be done.

Most of the time we've stumbled along, getting on each other's nerves a bit but not enough to head for the airport or start tossing a tyre lever from hand to hand while walking towards them. When we've got back we've then gone our separate ways and the whole thing chalked up to ... life or something. And it's not been a gender thing - I've been away with as many "difficult" women as men, although the problems do tend to manifest themselves in different ways.

Whether I've been seen as "the problem" by those same others is, of course, impossible as we're always the hero in our own story.

Of course you don't get any of those issues if you travel solo and you're free to cock things up to your heart's content. Because of that generally I tend to be a bit more cautious when I'm on my own - both "mechanically" in that I won't head off quite so far into the unknown as I would with others as back up and I'm also slightly more wary of accepting "invitations" - "come and spend the night at my house" from someone I met in a bar half an hour ago, that kind of thing. Not outright reluctant, just aware of my solo status and situation.

On the other hand I'm far more likely to interact with people, talk to strangers, if I'm with others - mainly because if you don't it'll be a very quiet trip. I remember reading an article in one of the mags many years ago about somebody (an older bloke) who rough camped on his first ever foreign trip to France (on an MZ!) and only ate packets of crisps and the like from service stations for two weeks as, not speaking French, he didn't want to make a fool of himself in cafes, restaurants, hotels etc. Even at my most inarticulate and anglo luddite I've never been that bad but having someone to take over when you're having a bad day is definitely a plus for group travel.

In 2015 I did two substantive trips - a solo one down to Italy on my antique 125 and a group one across the USA on the GoldWing. On the Eurotrip one of the things I was determined to do was to talk to everyone. English, French, sign language, universal language, anything that worked. Even if it didn't I was going to try. It took some effort but it paid off and I met some really interesting people. Even for those that weren't that interesting it was worth the effort to find out. Sure I got some surprising responses (one (Brit) woman even locked herself in her car when I approached ) but overall it made it a more enjoyable few weeks.

Some of that carried over to the USA but there were times, particularly when there were four of us (it varied over the trip), when it was easier just to stay self contained. We were lucky in that we all got on very well (two married couples so no fault lines) and you could relax a bit and withdraw within the group as usually someone would be looking out for you. I didn't have to be on top of everything all the time as I had to be on the earlier trip. That can get very stressful and with no easy way to resolve it. I've spent evenings on my own in some fly infested backwater just thinking "what the f*ck am I doing here?", but I've also spent evenings in hotel bars with travelling companions and thinking "what the f*ck are they doing here".