We had the good fortune of connecting with Expedition Stories and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Expedition Stories, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
We are a couple who love traveling and camping. Since the pandemic began, it has been difficult for many people to travel abroad. We created expeditionstories.us and our Instagram account (@expedition_stories) for people who are not able to travel in the US. Our goal is to share beautiful places in the US, through our blogs and photos. We hope our photos and traveling stories are able to cheer the community up.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
As a couple running a website (www.expeditionstories.us) together. One of our common intentions is to bring positive contribution to our community. What sets us apart is we are not afraid to try new ideas as they come up. This year, we started expeditionstories.us to provide camping tips, but recently we came up with another idea. The new idea we came up with is to start a website (www.expeditionshop.us) for selling used camping gear and overlanding campers. Since the demand for camping gear increased, new camping gear is becoming less affordable. We are hoping the Expedition Shop can support camping communities by providing an easier platform for a seller to list their gear and buyers to compare gear before their purchase.

We can’t answer whether it was easy to start a new brand because we just started a few months ago. Although we are expecting some challenging days in the future, we believe continuation is the key for success, so even when difficult days come we will continue running based on the goal of bringing positive contribution to the world.

We have both lived through some extremely difficult and stressful times. We have learned that success is not straightforward and that the Instagramable posts you see of others’ lives make it easy to forget how hard people actually have to work to get to where they are. We hope that anybody that is struggling can take some time to reflect and realize that they are not alone and that life is about the journey, not the destination.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
If our friends are flexible with time, we would tell them to come visit Colorado between September and October. We will first meet them at Denver International Airport. If it is time to eat we would want to take them to Southern Sun in Boulder for food. Southern Sun has amazing fries and outdoor seating. Then we would want to take them to Rocky Mountain National Park for camping. Between September and October, the national park is known for elk bugling, so we will be able to see male elk with large impressive antlers. After spending a few days in the park, we want to end the trip by eating Mexican food at Ed’s Cantina & Grill.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
We are inspired by many Youtubers who have posted videos of their travel stories. Their videos have cheered us up during the time we could not travel. One of our favorite Youtube cannels is from Japan called とったび（Tottabi). They are a couple who are uploading traveling videos of going around Japan. During the first 2 years of the pandemic, Tottabi were restricting their travel because they didn’t want to be the cause for spreading the disease. The content quality of Tottabi’s traveling videos were already highly inspiring, but we are especially inspired by their positive attitude while facing this challenging period of time during the pandemic. As a travel Youtube channel, it must have been stressful for not being able to post traveling videos, but Tottabi was able to come up with creative videos to continuously grab their audiences’ attention. During those 2 years, Tottabi introduced many ideas to experience the sense/feeling of traveling at home, such as cooking different countries’ cuisines, customizing a camper van, dressing up, etc.

Website: expeditionstories.us

Instagram: @expedition_stories

Twitter: @camp_and_photo

Youtube: Expedition Stories

Image Credits
Jessica Cheng

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