How We Met
In 2015, I decided to join my town’s Volunteer Ambulance Corps. I knew that I wanted to go to nursing school and thought that being an EMT would give me the experience I wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else. My sister was already a member and was so excited for me to join, too. I applied and was accepted that summer. I went to my orientation and came home with a roster of all the members of the Corps. My sister sat down with me in my room and we went down the roster and she told me something about every member, just for fun. I knew I would be meeting a lot of people a few days later because it was a meeting night, so I was excited to learn about everyone. When she got to Nick’s name, she said “oh yes, Nick is in the Navy. He just got home a few months ago. We like him.” My sister and I are very similar, so I trust her judgment. But I didn’t think twice about what she said… it was just another conversation. So, Wednesday rolled around and it was time for my first meeting as a member of the Ambulance Corps. My sister walked up to the meeting room with me and started introducing me to everyone. It was very overwhelming because I knew I wouldn’t remember most of the names she was telling me. So, we went to take our seats as the meeting was getting closer to starting. She leads me to the third row of seats and sat down to my left. One seat to her left was Nick. She introduced us, I smiled, and shook his hand. But I didn’t think twice about it… he was just another person I met that night. A few days later, I showed up at 6:45 pm to be on call. I walked across the parking lot and remembered that Nick was my crew chief that night when I saw him standing by the front door. We chatted outside about how his car still had Hawaii license plates on it because he hadn’t changed them since moving back home. We took our first call together that night. We laughed after we accidentally got lost in a pretty dangerous city while taking a patient to the hospital. We immediately got along. One of the next times we were on call together, we and a bunch of our other Ambulance Corps friends were sitting in the conference room at our headquarters. We all talked and laughed for hours. We asked Nick questions about Hawaii and eventually, we added each other as friends on Snapchat. The next day, I spent a long time drawing a picture on Snapchat to send to him… and that’s when I knew I liked him. We Snapchatted frequently over the next few weeks until we officially exchanged phone numbers. We texted every day, knowing we would only see each other once a week when we were on call. One Sunday evening in October, we agreed to meet at the Ambulance Corps to do homework, as we were both still college students. After we were done and ready to go home, he kissed me in the parking lot of the place we first met a few months earlier. We went on our first date the next week and became “official” the week after that. Every day we discovered something else we had in common. We grew closer as friends and as partners. We fell in love quickly and easily.
how they asked
Nick moved in with me when his mom moved to Florida in 2016. We frequently take trips there to visit her and to go to Walt Disney World. Our first vacation ever was to Disney, and we always have a lot of fun when we go there. Well, we had some leftover Disney and Universal park passes from our trip over the summer, and we each had a flight credit from Delta due to a mishap the year before… so, we planned a kind of last minute trip in December 2017, just as we have many other times. We flew down on a Wednesday and on Thursday, we went to the Magic Kingdom. Nick’s mom had gotten us tickets to the Keys to the Kingdom tour of the Magic Kingdom for Christmas, so we knew we had a long day ahead of us, as it was a five-hour walking tour.
We arrived very early that morning to begin our tour and had so much fun going behind the scenes (and underground!) the Magic Kingdom. After the tour was over, we went on a ride and did some shopping. The park was going to be closing early that day (at 6:00) so we knew we didn’t have that much time to enjoy ourselves. So, we walked over to our favorite photo spot on the bridge from Main Street U.S.A to Tomorrowland, with a perfect view of Cinderella’s Castle.
While I was trying to figure out where and how to stand, Nick’s mom was secretly telling the photographer he was going to propose. Without me even noticing, Nick went to put his backpack down and pulled a ring box out of it. When he finally walked back over to me, he kept turning me towards him instead of us both standing straight at the camera. I was so confused until he started talking to me. My arms dropped from his hips and he caught them and held my hands. I still didn’t notice the ring box, but I knew exactly where he was going. At 5:27 pm, Nick dropped down to one knee and opened the ring box.
He asked me to marry him and without hesitation, I said yes. Tears were streaming down my face and the crowd that had gathered began to clap. We embraced and took even more pictures, still hardly able to believe we were engaged. Luckily for us, Nick’s mom took a video of the whole proposal so we get to relive the amazing moment all the time. It was easily the most magical moment of our lives, in the most magical place on earth.
