A 24-year-old woman decided to live her best life after breaking up with her boyfriend, so she ditched the 9-5, bought a van and now travels the US with her beloved dog.
Sydney Ferbrache, from Indianapolis, Indiana, was inspired to start her new life after seeing a picture of another girl travelling in a van.
Rather than living with envy, the young woman decided to do something about it, and asked her boyfriend at the time to join her on an adventure.
The couple were working ’70 to 80 hours a week’, with Sydney telling INSIDER they were both ‘totally miserable’, so they purchased an $18,000 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter and spent thousands of dollars to make it fit for travelling.
She explained:
I saw this picture and it took me down this black tunnel hole of van life. I was scrolling for hours a day on my laptop and in between homework and everything else, just looking at vans.
We bought one, had it shipped to Indianapolis, and that was the start of how I discovered van life.
Sydney and her boyfriend hit the road in September 2017, but the 24-year-old soon realised her partner wasn’t ‘the one’. The keen traveller wanted to ‘reach for the stars’, so she decided to go it alone.
The Indiana native decided to start afresh, and let her ex keep the van. Sydney then worked three jobs, as well as a ‘ton of side gigs,’ for two months in order to save up for transport of her very own.
By May 2018, Sydney had saved enough to purchase a $24,000 Ford Transit van. She renovated it, adding a full kitchen, a king-size bed and a toilet, and got ready to hit the road.
Just before she set off, however, she decided she needed one more thing to make her setup complete – a golden retriever puppy, named Ella.
The 24-year-old began her adventure earlier this year and has since travelled to 20 different states, including Montana, Utah, Arizona, California and Oregon, as well as Quebec in Canada.
She funds her travels through advertising and affiliate marketing on her website, and by helping people design their own blogs. Sydney shares her adventures through a podcast and on her Instagram page, Divine On The Road.
Recalling her first few days on the road, Sydney said:
It was the most freeing. I truly felt like such a bad*ss. I made this happen, I cannot believe I actually made this happen.
It was such a cool feeling of ‘I’m driving my home around the country.’
The traveller returns home to in Indiana every few months to see her family and spend some time with her two-year-old nephew, but she has no plans to quit her new-found way of life any time soon.
Sydney hopes to make it to Alaska by spring 2020, and plans to visit Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia along the way.
She expressed her love of being on the road, saying:
I’ve never woken up once in the last year and not felt like this isn’t exactly what I should be doing. I don’t foresee anywhere in the near future where I want to stop, but I also don’t want to hold myself to this idea that I have to be on the road.
Sydney went on to encourage other women to follow in her footsteps, adding:
I really believe society has instilled in us that we should be fearful of the world and that we should have a man by our side to see things. We are taught to be scared, we don’t feel that way innately.
I like to prove in the way I do things that that’s not how we have to live our lives.
With Ella for company and the whole world ahead of her, Sydney has certainly chosen an amazing path.
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Emily Brown first began delivering important news stories aged just 13, when she launched her career with a paper round. She graduated with a BA Hons in English Language in the Media from Lancaster University, and went on to become a freelance writer and blogger. Emily contributed to The Sunday Times Travel Magazine and Student Problems before becoming a journalist at UNILAD, where she works on breaking news as well as longer form features.