1) How did you meet and fall in love?
I met her in high school while getting lunch at a nearby convenience store. The connection was instant, and we quickly became best friends, often staying up chatting until the sun was almost up. We didn’t realize that we liked each other until we started college three years later, and by then we had already moved to the opposite sides of the country. Long distance was very hard at times, but it helped us grow even closer as a couple and made us realize just how important we were to each other.
2) Tell us about your proposal? Tell us about your wedding?
We knew very early on that we wanted to get married, but it wasn’t until after we both graduated that we started planning the details. She had always said that she wanted a proposal in the snow, so I planned a trip to Denver, contacted our wedding photographer, and had him follow us while we hiked up to a frozen alpine lake. She had already suspected I was going to propose soon, so to catch her off guard, I worked with her mom to convince her that I had left the ring at home, and that this really was a trip “just because”. It worked a bit too well and made it a lot more difficult to convince her to get up at 3AM for a random sunrise hike, but we’ve always been spontaneous so we eventually made it to the lake and I proposed at sunrise.
For our wedding, we wanted to keep our vows private and ceremony intimate, so we decided to have an elopement instead. We hiked 15 miles through the Swiss Alps on our wedding day, and it was more fun and beautiful than we ever could’ve imagined.
2) Tell us about your Nolan and Vada engagement ring and why you chose it?
I already knew she wanted a sapphire engagement ring, specifically a deep blue sapphire from Sri Lanka. Her grandpa passed away a few months into our relationship, and she wanted a reminder of him in the ring since I never got to meet him and he would not be able to attend our wedding. He used to live in Sri Lanka, so it was really important to us that the stone could be sourced from there. Nolan and Vada delivered a beautiful sapphire that was the exact color we were looking for from Sri Lanka. At first we were a bit wary of ordering a ring online, but we are so happy we did. We’ve always loved traveling together, so it was fitting that our ring was from New Zealand and our elopement had so many pieces from so many different countries.