Today we’d like to introduce you to Kyle and Jessica Harris.
Kyle and Jessica, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Our story is not unlike most – we both went to college, got degrees, and landed jobs at a great company. We are CPAs who have worked at the same company since we graduated college in Colorado in 2012. We would hang out all the time at work and eventually became best friends, ultimately falling in love. In 2015, we were traveling to the beach all the time having both grown up in landlocked (albeit beautiful) Colorado. Beaches in Greece, Mexico, California (even San Diego), the Carolinas and South Padre (not our best beach haha). So one day we decided to cut out the middle man and move to San Diego. Little did we know, all the time traveling to beach had infected us with a deep passion for travel.
Fast forward to 2016 and we were engaged, and in August 2017, we got married in La Jolla. As we were paying for the wedding ourselves (we had to keep it super small) we seriously contemplated blowing off the responsibility to pay for one giant party for a single night and instead eloping and then traveling for three months. Well we went ahead with the wedding, and it really was the best day of our lives, but that desire to travel for three months never dissipated. We were both doing very well at work but had serious fatigue from massive hours sitting at a computer. About eight months after our wedding, we concocted a plan to ask for a three-month leave, so we could set off on a trip of a lifetime around the world.
We asked the question, and the answer was YES! In August 2018, we were off on a worldwide adventure, just the two of us. Since we were both types A personalities who needed something to obsess over, and since we had no work responsibilities, we thought it would be fun to start an IG travel account. Kyle had barely ever used IG before, and Jess used it casually. But we thought it would be a great way to give our three-month adventure a little extra purpose, a tangible goal (not that traveling the world isn’t incredible enough). And it was so much fun. We started off with 10 days in Tanzania trekking to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro and doing a three day safari in the Serengeti. Then we spent a week in Nairobi Kenya, at an orphanage, working with the most incredible organization.
We bounced around Northern Africa and the Middle East, seeing the some of the greatest historical and modern wonders of the world including the Great Pyramid, Petra, Jerusalem, and Burj Khlaifa in Dubai. Next we were off for six weeks in South East Asia. We met up with several friends in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, and then Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia. Around the end of our two-month mark is when our daily posting on IG really started to take-off. We rounded out our trip with a little over 20 days driving around Australia and NZ, and by the time we headed home in mid-November, we had close to 10k followers. We hit 10k in December 2018 and had reached 12k by January 2019.
We work hard in our jobs at home and love the life we live in San Diego, California. But the world is too much beauty for us to not see and explore. In 2019, we managed to travel through five more countries. We’ve been able to have so much fun, see so much of the world, develop an amazing community of friends online while still maintaining challenging and successful professional careers. It’s been quite the amazing adventure and we have been able to collaborate with some awesome hospitality brands while on trips and even local brands here in California such as MVMT, and our personal favorite, Cutwater Spirits here in San Diego.
When we set out on our IG journey, we just wanted to share our love of travel with others and hopefully encourage others to travel more and experience the world, and if we ever received anything free for our efforts, hey that was just a cherry on top. The response we’ve received is incredible, and we’re living our dream. We both recently started at a smaller local accounting firm, which provides even more flexibility and still a fun challenging work environment where we collaborate daily with strong like-minded individuals. This has us even more excited for where the future will take us, and what’s next in our personal and IG lives!
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Our biggest challenge is balancing full-time professional careers with the desire to constantly travel and see more of the world. We’ve begun to strike a healthy balance over time but hope to continue to fine-tune to where we’re able to maximize our personal happiness, our professional and personal goals, and to continue to inspire others to see the world while getting to experience as much culture as we possibly can. There is nothing in life as powerful as perspective, and there is nothing that can shift perspectives as radically as travel (in our humble opinions), which is why we’re so passionate.
Please tell us more about your work. What do you guys do? What do you specialize in? What sets you apart from competition?
We are a travel couple that loves to explore the world and share our travels with our engaged followers. From the heights of Mount Kilimanjaro to the wonders of Petra, and the depths of the Great Barrier Reef, our passion is to travel and experience the world! We love to share not only the amazing places we visit but also the incredible adventures we get to experience.
We started our Instagram account just over a year and a half ago in August 2018 and have enjoyed some amazing organic growth to over 17k followers! We love a perfect vacation, which for us an exciting blend of adventure, beautiful scenery, and well-planned logistics, and our followers are looking for the same! We have a tremendous community of travel and adventure focused followers from all around the world!
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
We have just started new jobs and are exciting for some big trips this year. Incredibly, we were so close a month ago to booking two huge trips, one to China and one to Italy. Obviously, we’re holding off on those trips right now, as we pray for those impacted by the Coronavirus. Our travels this year may, therefore, be focused bit more on tropical settings, including our first flights booked internally in 2020 to the Cook islands!
Contact Info:
- Email: harrisroundtheworld@gmail.com
- Instagram: @harrisroundtheworld
Image Credit:
@harrisroundtheworld
Jess & Kyle Harris
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