How I Met My Best Friend

I'm sure most of you are familiar with my best friend, Katie. Katie runs the blog Chic in Carolina and is mentioned frequently here on the blog and on my social media sites. I occasionally get questions about how Katie & I met, seeing as I'm from Ohio and she's from North Carolina. The story behind how Katie & I met is actually kind of funny so I figured I would share it here on the blog.

Rewind back to 2016. Katie and I had been following each other on Instagram for a while and one day Katie reached out to me about potentially collaborating on a blog post. Without hesitation or second thought, I agreed and we launched our collab "10 Things I Can't Travel Without" (read my post HERE, read Katie's post HERE).

A couple days after our collab went live, I left Ohio to drive down to Florida for Spring Break. I posted a photo on my twitter account of myself standing next to the Welcome to North Carolina sign and Katie replied to that tweet & we had a short convo as seen in the screenshot of our twitter thread below.

After learning that Katie lived in the Charlotte area, I sent her a quick email as I drove through Charlotte just saying hi. Looking back, I don't know why I did this because it's honestly a little bit creepy. Katie & I have searched our email inboxes up and down but neither of us can find this email anymore.

After talking a bit more via email (this was prior to having one another's phone numbers) we learned that the place I was staying in Florida was only an hour from Katie's grandparents house where she would be staying the same time I was in Florida.

We decided that we had to meet up because meeting in the middle of a one hour difference would be a lot easier than meeting in the middle of a six hour difference between Ohio and North Carolina.

By this point we had finally exchanged phone numbers, and contemplated meeting in St. Augustine but decided to meet at a shopping complex in Jacksonville which was about in the middle of our destinations.

When we both told our moms that we were going to meet one another, our moms were slightly worried about meeting someone we'd met online and the whole internet safety ordeal. After assuring my parents that Katie was in fact a real person they agreed and my dad drove me up to Jacksonville a couple days later.

March 25, 2016

In true Riley & Katie fashion, we met up outside of a Starbucks and my dad actaully got the whole thing on film. I was slightly embarassed that he recorded the video, after all, I had literally just met Katie, but looking back, Katie & I actually like that we captured the moment we met.

We then proceeded to shop but neither of us bought anything. In Nordstrom, I was floored when Katie knew all the names and styles of the Lilly dresses (she still does this). We then took blog photos by what we now refer to as the "Artsy Palm Trees" and asked the valet girl to take the first picture of us together (the first photo in this post!). Fun fact: I never actually shared the photos that we took, oops, but you can read Katie's post HERE. We then had lunch at California pizza kitchen and talked for a long time and then Katie's mom picked her up. The next day, Katie texted me a picture of her Lilly Pulitzer Callahan chino shorts (that I was wearing the day we met) because she didn't want us to stop talking to each other.

Fast forward to present day & Katie and I are best friends and text each other all the time, have a 100 day snap streak (after I had to create Katie's account for her because she didn't have one), have visited each other at our schools and taken weekend road trips together.

This sounds so cliche but Katie is the Serena to my Blair (for real though, we dressed up as them for one of my sorority functions!) and she's my person and I'm extremely grateful that blogging lead me to meet her.