Friends of Tabletop: Meet Christina and Carl from NC Tipping & Travel Through Life!
We are so excited to continue our monthly series highlighting the many social influencers and bloggers who have become not only our colleagues, but our friends throughout our journey with Tabletop Media Group. Last year, we started a new series here on the #TabletopTalk blog called, “Friends of Tabletop.” We’re here to spread some positivity and highlight the bloggers + influencers who we enjoy collaborating with and who are so incredibly talented!
This month, we’re featuring the lovely Christina and Carl from NC Tripping & Travel Through Life. Check out our fun Q&A with them both!
Tell us about NC Tripping & Travel Through Life (i.e. when did you start it, what do you cover, etc.).
Blogging started as a way for us to connect with our families while we were living in South Korea in 2011. We lived and taught English there for 5 years. During our many vacations, we traveled all across Asia and documented our trips along the way.
While living in Asia, we started several (now embarrassing) blogs and even started a travel site in English for one city we lived in! Sharing what we were doing was our connection to our lives back in America, and over time, it started to grow into a passion. That’s how Travel Through Life was born.
After moving back to the US and settling into life in North Carolina, we decided to “niche-down” and created NC Tripping. We started a family and wanted to travel closer to home, but also still have the same amazing adventures we had before just with our little one.
Carl had always wanted to work on the blogs fulltime, but Christina was a lot more hesitant. In April 2019, the universe decided for us and Carl lost his job. We decided to go all in together and build our websites as a full-time career, which has been hard, scary, but also the best thing that’s ever happened to us.
Why do you write about food + Triangle area happenings?
When we moved back to America in 2015, we wanted to treat North Carolina with the same wonder and curiosity that we did when exploring Asia. We wanted to show readers that travel is all around you and that it’s possible to have meaningful and #instaworthy experiences every day.
What are you currently reading?
Christina: 5 Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed. This is a riveting tale about pain, advice, and betrayal.
Carl : Listening to “Crushing It” by Gary Vaynerchuk between true crime podcasts and NPR All Songs Considered.
What's your favorite ice cream flavor?
Christina: Mint Chocolate Chip.
Carl: Cherry Garcia
What is your least favorite food?
Christina: Olives. I’ve tried. I even forced them in my mouth in Sicily and still couldn’t love them.
Carl: Raw Onions. I love them cooked alone and especially into something. Cooked? I’ll eat them if they’re essential to enjoying said thing that’s on the plate.
What about favorite food?
Christina : Any kind of spicy noodles or barbecue. I love barbecue so much we’ve written a post on 25+ barbecue restaurants in North Carolina.
Carl: Butter Chicken.
Bar order?
Christina: Gin and Tonic.
Carl: Old Fashioned.
What's the most useful lesson you've learned from being a blogger?
Christina: Staying true to your brand matters. Your audience needs to know you are there for them, which means you aren’t going to cheapen what you are telling them for a quick buck or a couple of extra Instagram followers. Know what your brand is and go in authentically and transparently.
Carl: Don’t depend on one source for traffic. Google, Facebook, and other gods of the internet can and will pull the rug out from under you every now and then, so it’s important to have multiple traffic streams going.
What's your most unpopular opinion about food?
Christina: Food doesn’t have to be fancy to be incredible. I’ve had some pretty terrible meals from places that had all the right buzzwords. I’ve also had the best meal of my life for $3 on a plastic stool down a back alleyway in Chiang Mai. Expensive and fancy doesn’t equal amazing.
Carl: I’m with Christina on this one. Sometimes, we forget that food is just meant to taste good, not always look good. The restaurants and chefs that understand this are the ones that will always survive.
If you could redo one thing in regards to your blogging/social influencer career what would it be?
Christina: I would have learned how to use my camera and invested in it properly from the beginning. I didn’t start learning to manipulate and think about my shots until a year ago. In fact, I went through a phase where I didn’t even want to touch my camera or edit photos. I think if I had learned earlier I wouldn’t put so much pressure on myself now to do better now that it is our career.
Carl: I wish I would’ve understood the importance of SEO like I do now. I was too busy chasing social numbers to realize that Google could (sometimes) work on a larger scale than Facebook shares or viral pins do. Those are still fun, of course!