Meet Our Brand Ambassadors: Cherise and Chris!

Starting in 2022, Landing is thrilled to be partnering with members from all over the country as they travel, explore, and live their best life while staying with us. Cherise and Chris, two Los Angeles locals working in the entertainment industry, will be living with Landing this year and embarking on a digital nomad journey across the U.S. 

Read on to learn more about where Cherise and Chris are headed, what they’re most excited about, and their advice for anyone thinking about becoming a digital nomad themselves. 

Where are you planning to live with Landing?

Cherise: This year, we’re planning on staying in San Antonio, Charleston, Boston, Phoenix, and then New York for a month. We still have to figure out our last cities, but we’re thinking about heading somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, like Seattle.

We’re really excited about staying in New York long-term. I’ve been there a million times, but usually for work instead of pleasure. So I’m in and out and maybe do one or two touristy things, but now we want to be real New Yorkers! We want to be with the people and have some bagels—or a slice! We’re dying to explore Harlem and we want to go to a “Saturday Night Live” taping and the football and basketball games.

Chris: We’re also so excited about heading to Boston. We want to get Boston cream pie at the Omni Parker House and eat some Waldorf chicken salad and clam chowder. We can’t wait to hit up the monuments along the Freedom Trail. We’re also trying to coordinate some of our cities with festivals that are happening. When we go to San Antonio, it’s going to be fiesta time! Landing has already recommended we check out the puffy tacos or take a stroll down the Riverwalk there. 

What are you planning to do and see while you’re traveling?

Cherise: We’re history buffs. I minored in history in college and Chris minored in religion. We travel to places where we’re very much into the cultural aspects of it. While we’re traveling, we want to highlight black businesses and people of color and share information about their businesses, tours, shops, and restaurants. We want to show these amazing places that are often overlooked.

I research all the time the “best stuff” in every city and country we visit, and very rarely are there black businesses and black restaurants featured. You might find one, maybe the most popular one, like Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles in Los Angeles—it’s the most popular one, it’s been in so many rap songs! But there are so many incredible places, and we want to highlight them in every city we explore.

That’s one of the reasons we want to go to Charleston, South Carolina. It’s the birthplace of slavery in the United States, so we want to learn more about that history, because our history is everyone’s history. 

Chris: We also want to link up with other Landing ambassadors. If we go to a city and there are other people who are Landing members, we want to meet up with them and learn about how they’re living their Landing life. We did a meetup in Los Angeles with the King family and had a Soul Food Sunday brunch. It was a great time! We had some great food and drinks. It really felt like Landing is a community of friends. 

What are you most excited about when you think about living with Landing?

Cherise: What’s so great about Landing is that it works with our current lifestyle. We’ve already been traveling, working remotely, and living abroad, so it’s really conducive to how we live.  It will allow us to travel and hang with locals, eating what they eat and seeing what they see. 

More than anything, I’m excited to see different parts of the country. We’re going to places that weren’t even on our bucket list. I don’t want to generalize, but I think a lot of people want to explore the major cities in the U.S., like LA, New York, Chicago, and Miami. We’ve traveled a lot already and we’ve hit these major cities. Our passion has been more so going abroad and traveling the world, so when this opportunity to live with Landing came, we realized we could see more of our own country and visit places we never really thought to go before. 

When we were creating our video for the #LandingLife contest, we had to answer where we would live if we won. So we went through all 200 cities Landing was operating in at the time, narrowed it down to our top 10, then watched a ton of videos and read a lot of content about each city. We really didn’t know much about these places, but once we did our research, they all sounded amazing. 

When we didn’t win the grand prize in the contest and Landing asked us to be ambassadors, those four cities we would’ve won, grew into all these other cities. Now we can really explore a lot of the places we never even imagined visiting. That’s how you really discover places that you never knew you’d fall in love with—the hidden gems! 

Chris: I think that people also have preconceived notions about certain places. But you might find a gem! You might find your place. Like they say on the show “Scandal,” you might find your Vermont! But you have to give it a chance. You have to try it. How do you know what you love or where you want to live if you’ve never been? 

What do you want budding digital nomads or other travelers to know about your adventures? 

Cherise: We really want people to know that black people travel! We like to get out there and explore and move. We’re digital nomads, too. So much of the marketplace doesn’t cater to us at all—it’s kind of like we’re invisible. But we travel and explore, and it’s important to see representation for people who look like us who are living the digital nomad life.

Chris: We also want to reach people who are tentative about this type of lifestyle. The past two years have been rough, and people have wanted to make a change, move to a new city, or work from home, but are afraid or scared to take the leap. And if they see people like us doing it, they’re like, “I can do it, too!” My advice for people is to jump! Leap! It sounds cliche, but you have to start. If you want it, if you believe it, if you want to manifest it, go and do it. We’re very spiritual like that.

Just take the chance, because you never know what you’re going to fall in love with. Fear holds a lot of people back, especially after these past two years. But there’s no better time than now to take the leap. Take that trip. Take that job. Travel. See the world. Follow your dreams. Whatever you want to do, now is the time. 

Cherise: I also want people to know that there’s no perfect scenario. Waiting for perfection holds a lot of people back. They’re trying to make sure that they have enough money saved up or things lined up, but it’s never going to be the perfect time or the perfect opportunity. You just have to take that leap. Life’s not perfect, but it’s perfectly imperfect. That’s when you find the most joy out of life, when you’re discovering something new about yourself and the world around you. Don’t worry if it’s not all worked out in your head—just go for it! Take a chance. No regrets.  You never know what could happen.