How We Met
We met on a flight to Europe. We were both traveling alone and choose our seats. The flight wasn’t fully booked so it was fate we both chose the row we did because we could have been seated anywhere on that flight and never crossed paths.
I was off to Italy for a month to travel alone, after years of waiting to meet someone to go with I decided I couldn’t wait any longer so I went off on my own to discover the world and myself.
Tom was also headed there, however, he was surprising his parents in Sicily for a week. They have a home there and spend a month every year there however in 2019 he wasn’t going to go, but booked a last-minute flight due to some downtime at work.
My trip too was somewhat last minute, I had booked a trip and flights for the month prior but the tour I wanted to go on wasn’t full enough so it was canceled, and I went a month later than originally planned.
We spent 2 flights together, Melbourne to Singapore and Then to Dubai and talked the whole way. There were an instant connection and familiarity there. We parted ways in Dubai as he was going onto Sicily and I flew into Venice, without exchanging details. I only had his first name and the suburb he lived in to go off and spent my 4-hour stopover in Dubai searching social media to find him, eventually, I did. We exchanged messages every day for the month I was away and we met up the day after I got home, the rest is history.
How They Asked
We planned to go to Sicily for a month last year and it was to be my Mums 60th birthday while we were going to be away. My sister and her partner were also going to be in Europe for some time so we decided to surprise mum with a trip to Sicily where would all meet up and spend a week together for her Birthday, with Tom’s family also being there.
Little did I know the surprise was on me the whole time. The ‘Birthday” event he had so beautifully planned for my Mum at Ristorante La Trota was actually an engagement party for us. He got me to the venue early to check mums party was set up and it was silent, there were lights and it was a foggy still night, with no-one in sight. Toms friend owns the Estate and greeted us with champagne and suggested we take a walk around the property while we wait for everyone else to arrive.
We walked over to a beautiful bridge that overlooked the entire property and asked me to marry him, with a 3-carat pear cut champagne and rose gold diamond ring he has spent 6 months designing and having made. There were many tears shed, never could I have imagined an engagement like this, let alone my own. The moment I said yes, 5 minutes of spectacular fireworks followed, then our families arrived and we celebrated the night away. We will return next year to the same venue in Sicily to marry. Our first daughter is due in 2 weeks time, we didn’t know it at the time, but she was there with us all along.
