Rising Stars: Meet Christina Riley

Today we’d like to introduce you to Christina Riley.

Hi Christina, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Carl and I met back in college and quickly after dating we moved to South Korea to teach English. While we were there we both fell in love with travel and documenting our travels. We started several blogs, bought a camera, and started telling our story.

We moved to North Carolina in 2015 and decided to treat our new home state with the same wonder as our travels in Asia. We traveled every weekend and every vacation day we could get. Carl dreamed of making our blog something full-time, but I was skeptical. In 2019, Carl lost his job and we didn’t have any other job options available.

We decided to go all-in and try and make travel blogging a career while also juggling a young child. So here we are, 3 years later, still traveling every weekend and every chance we get and documenting it.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Carl losing his job was one of the hardest, yet also defining moments in our journey. We weren’t earning any income from our website and still had a lot of work to do to get there. Once we finally got to a place where we were making some money, the pandemic hit and we couldn’t encourage people to travel.

So overnight we lost a lot of the work we had done. There have been a lot of instances of rebuilding and redefining for us throughout our career and while it’s been challenging- it’s a part of our journey that we embrace.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We like to think that we are one of the only independent North Carolina travel websites out there! It’s just Carl and I and we run both the website and social media for an audience of over 3 million annual readers.

While many think of blogging as centering around the creator, we like to make North Carolina the feature in all of our work and we show up occasionally. We want to encourage people to travel throughout the state and experience the beauty and hospitality that we see in every corner and small town.

What are your plans for the future?
After 3 years of traveling full-time, we still haven’t been everywhere in North Carolina! So this year we hope to revisit some destinations and refresh our content as well as find new hidden gems.

Eventually, we’d like to put out our second book- but in the meantime, we’re going to keep growing and sharing beautiful North Carolina!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.nctripping.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/nctripping
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/nctripping
• Tiktok: @nctripping

Image Credits
Rachel Abi and NC Tripping