Carrie Bell

Although she’s only been writing about Los Angeles and California for TripSavvy since 2018, Carrie Bell has spent her whole life preparing for a gig as a Golden State expert. She was born and raised in Fresno (as central as it gets), schooled in the far North of the state, lived for a spell in Bay Area and has called Southern California home for more than a decade.

Carrie has written about travel, entertainment, weddings and lifestyle for a variety of print and digital publications including People, Fodor’s, Bridal Guide, Yahoo, Reader’s Digest,Entertainment Weekly,California Wedding Day, Angeleno, Caribbean Travel + Life, Cosmopolitan, POPSUGAR, LAX Magazine, LiveStrong, Destination Weddings + Honeymoons, TV Guide and Refinery29.

Carrie has ventured to four continents, 37 countries, seven Canadian provinces and 40 American states—even still one of her favorite things to do is play tourist in her own city.

Experience

By the time she started working on her junior high yearbook, Carrie knew what she wanted to be. After honing her skills at the college newspaper and magazine, she relocated to Santa Monica and spent a year as an assistant editor at the now defunct U. The National College Magazine. For the next decade, she specialized in covering entertainment and celebrities, first at full-time gigs with Billboard, Entertainment Weekly, and Us Magazine and then later as a full-time freelancer. Red carpets, set visits, attending the Sundance Film Festival, riding in the exterior elevator of an aircraft carrier with Ben Affleck in Pearl Harbor and interviewing all of her childhood crushes were exciting but she also really wanted to write about other passions—food, wine, animals and travel.

Since broadening her journalistic horizons, she has hiked Machu Picchu, eaten at multiple Michelin-starred restaurants, worked a Tuscan grape harvest for Santa Margherita wines, baked with Christina Tosi, went on a polar bear safari, kayaked in three oceans, zip-lined over Kauai, toured Frank Sinantra’s Palm Springs house and recording studio, went to a drag show in Thailand and tried to learn to play the bagpipes in Scotland. She never turns down homemade ice cream, pizza or tacos and collects snowglobes. To this day, she is happiest when she can combine her love and expertise in the two fields into one story.

She also co-wrote a book called The Bathtub Reader: An Amusing Miscellany For The Discerning Mademoiselle.

Education

Carrie graduated as valedictorian from Humboldt State University in only three years with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a minor in popular culture and the arts.

About TripSavvy and Dotdash Meredith

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