Happy 2015, everyone! We hope you had a great holiday season with your family and friends! We spent Christmas in Pennsylvania with my parents which was very relaxing. Then we headed to Ocean City, MD for New Year’s… where something crazy and completely unexpected happened: Andrew proposed! It happened at sunrise on New Years Day. I had absolutely no idea. I didn’t even know he had a ring or what the ring was… turns out, Andrew is sneaky (in the best way possible).
We shot a video of the sunrise using our IPhone and the Time-Lapse feature. The video is set to Caroline Pennel’s version of Anything Can Happen. Here’s the link to the video on our YouTube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yjfcbAgTNE
Here’s a picture of the ring:
Engagement Ring
It’s recycled platinum with a type of garnet- a Hessonite. It’s the perfect ring for many reasons but even more perfect because it’s orange (my favorite color) and it’s his birthstone. I’m a not a huge diamond fan and as you either already learned or will learn, I don’t follow the norm. My birthstone… also happens to be a diamond. Additionally, the setting came from a company that is eco-conscious and uses all recycled metals. Anyway, it is perfect.
After the proposal, we spent about an hour looking at rental houses in Costa Rica… that’s where we met and we had talked about how fun it would be to have a wedding there…so we looked at ridiculously priced mansion that no one in their right mind could ever afford… just because. We went out to a lazy breakfast at Dough Roller and just “bathed in the love” for a while. We called our families that afternoon. This leads me to the first thing that we learned about getting engaged/planning a wedding: we had no idea how long the calls and conversations about getting engaged would be. I’m not saying it was a bad thing; on the contrary, it was so fun to hear how excited our parents and siblings and siblings-in-law were about the news… we just figured the conversations would be shorter. About 4 hours later (hehe– lots to talk about!) we were exhausted and utterly smitten. :0).
We spent the first part of Friday at Dogfish Head Brewery in Milton, DE. Fantastic place, by the way. The tours are free and you get 4 free samples from their list of at least 12 different beers. They also have a non-alcoholic beverage on tap called Beach Beer. The tour is over an hour long but takes you through the different areas of the brewery and explains all the different processes and beers made there as well as the bottling facility. Very awesome. Another post on Dogfish Head later.
Four Free Beer Samples!
After that, we headed to Andrew’s other surprise… the Ultimate Couples Retreat. It included a 1.5-hour full body massage, a bottle of champagne with strawberries and chocolate fondue, an hour in a hot tub, and then dinner. Dinner consisted of three courses: the first course was granny smith apples, baguette, and veggies with a 17-herb cheese fondue; the second course was chicken, shrimp, filet mignon, and vegetables with a broth fondue; and the third course was graham crackers, marshmallows, cookies, bananas, and strawberries with chocolate fondue. The dinner was served with a bottle of wine (Andrew requested Moscato for me… yummmm!)
First course: 17-herb cheese fondue!
So, 2015 started off on a high note for us– and we couldn’t be more excited for the future!
Larking Our Way Through Life 