The Engagement Story

Over the holidays, I left my fiancé (OMG, that is so weird to say!) and flew home to Hawaii – a supposed break from the Oregon winter.  Unfortunately, it poured for the entire week and flooded my family’s home. We spent Christmas ripping out a carpet that smelled like wet dog. I’m not going to lie. It was really gross. *Sigh* Sometimes a girl just needs a margarita.

On the bright side, we’ve had some incredibly beautiful days this winter in the Pacific Northwest. Sam planned a getaway weekend for us in early December, which happened to be one of the gorgeously clear weekends. I thought the getaway was awfully romantic; little did I know how romantic the weekend would really get. We drove up to Seattle, where Sam had made hotel reservations. Between family and friends, we’re in Seattle quite a bit. But we’re frugal, and typically we do couch hopping for our weekend getaways. You can image my excitement when we checked in Hotel Max, a gorgeous, artsy and sophisticated hotel that I highly recommend it for your next Seattle excursion. It’s actually the sister hotel to Hotel DeLuxe in Portland – known for it’s similarly unique and artsy scene. Not to mention that the hotels amenities were all Aveda products. Hello! You can bet I stuffed my purse with the extra shampoos before we left. Not only was I impressed with the hotel itself, we were just blocks from Nordstrom, Pike Place Market and the heart of downtown Seattle.

Sam couldn’t stop looking at his watch cell phone during check-in, and after dropping off our bags and freshening up, he skirted me off to our lunch reservations. Seriously, lunch reservations. The man clearly did some major planning, and I was impressed, if not weirded out a little bit. Who makes lunch reservations? Well, it's a good thing Sam did, because we were able to squeeze into a table at the Tilikum Cafe, an adorable little French bistro not far from the hotel. You can read my review here.

After a pretty incredible lunch, we took a comical taxi ride up to Kerry Park, an overlook a few miles above downtown where Sam wanted to take some cityscape photos (read: he did not really want to take any photos. It’s a good thing I’m completely gullible). We laugh about the cab ride now, but at the time, we were both sitting on the edge of our seats hoping Ashton Kutcher would pop out to tell us it was all a joke. The cab driver didn’t speak English, nor did he obey ANY traffic rules (we’re talking a dead stop in the middle of a crowded Seattle street to look at a map, turning right as we were screaming “left, turn left!” and other serious offenses).

 

 

Sooo… eventually, we made it to the park, where there was a stunning view of the Space Needle and snow-capped Mountains (don’t ask me which mountains, I’m geographically challenged). Sam took some pictures (none of which came out, the poor guy was so nervous... as if I would have said anything but yes.) and was talk, talk, talking like he does when he’s nervous. He had a bunch of mushy things to say about me, us, our relationship and I’ll spare you of all the details. But at some point, he seemed frustrated with the lens he was using on his camera, and got down on the ground to grab a new lens from his camera bag. It took me a moment before I realized he actually switched out his camera for THE MOST GORGEOUS RING that was hidden in his camera bag. On one knee, Sam asked me to marry him. And although he jokes that I reached my hand out for the ring before opening my mouth, I know that I said yes – and that I felt like the luckiest girl in the world.

The rest of the story is a bit of a blur. There were lots of tears (happy ones, of course), and it took me a while to calm down so we could finally call our family and friends, and most importantly, change our Facebook statuses.

So that’s the story, two months later. I have to say that, I wasn’t sure being engaged would be any different. But it is. Since we’re in the spirit of Valentine’s Day, I’m going to take a moment to be mushy and say that, I feel closer to Sam than I ever have, and I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with him.