flashback friday #20

On this day seven years ago, Phil505 popped the big question. I had just arrived in Portland for the very first time.

If you didn't already know - we met online, and wrote each other for six months before we even talked on the phone. I think a total of about eleven people knew I was corresponding online with some guy that lived 2,000 miles away. I was kind of quiet about things like that. I figured the fewer people that knew, the better. Three months after the first phone call, we met. He came to see me first, of course. That's when I arrived at the airport late, saw him for the first time, got my first kiss, and consequently forget where I had parked my car in the airport parking garage. Then he came back to visit me on my birthday two months later, but I remembered where my car was that time. So after a year I finally flew out to Oregon. After that it was eleven more very long months of corresponding long distance and planning as many trips as we could afford until we got married. We got to spend a whopping 45 days together before we said I do.

Anyways, he took me right from the airport to the International Rose Test Garden. A lot of people didn't know that we had already gotten the ring a few months earlier. I was kind of quiet about things like that. And, in fact, after it had been sized, I actually packed it up in a box and mailed it to him so he could make all his little plans. I should've known that he was going to be proposing when he nearly killed me almost running through a red light on the way there. But instead, we got out and walked around, and it never even crossed my mind. I was expecting it to be later on in the week. It was kind of busy there that day, rather crowded, as a matter of fact. We finally ended up in a part of the garden where we were by ourselves. It was just us and the bench. We sat and talked for a bit and then he got down on one knee, pulled a folded up napkin out of his pocket where he'd been keeping the ring safe, and proposed. I said yes and the rest is history!