Lessons from the Road: Sydney Hatmaker on Saying Yes to the World pt. 1

Episode 25

At 24 years old, Jennifer Hatmaker was parenting her first diaper baby on no sleep as a stay-at-home mom and pastor’s wife. By contrast, Jen’s second-born, Sydney Hatmaker, spent half of her 24th year on a gap year travelling the world and banking a lifetime of memories.

In this special two-part conversation, Sydney walks us through some of the best moments and lessons learned from her life-changing adventure, beginning in May in Berlin and ending in October in Vietnam. With stops along the way in Sicily, Turkey, Portugal, Spain, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and Thailand, Sydney gives us some of her best tips for travelling solo on a shoestring budget. It might entail a 40-hour journey taking a car to a bus to a ferry to a bus, to another ferry, to a train, to a taxi, to a scooter, to a hostel, all to save $60, but the point is it can be done and she’s here to inspire us all with tales from her adventure.

Highlights from this conversation include:

• In our GenXcellence Travel-Edition, we reflect on what travel was like for us in the 80s-90s, before satellites and cell phones and Expedia (Sydney has never heard of Traveller’s Cheques) 
• Sydney gives us her best tips for getting into one of the world’s most popular techno clubs in Berlin (shh! It’s very hush-hush!)
• We learn about surfing camp on the coastline of the Portuguese Riviera 
• Why you need to budget more for European travel than Asian travel and how you can eat in Asia on $4 a day
• Sydney talks about learning to be comfortable travelling on her own and being in her own company – something she thought she was already good at but was pushed to new limits
• And a lot more…..

Be sure to tune in for part two of our conversation next week to hear how the story ends.