Hello fellow Knotties!
My FI and I have been together for the better part of 12 years (mostly on, a little off ;-), since we were in high school together. For the past several months, I have been on him, throwing in some (not so) subtle comments about getting engaged. I also went to a networking event a couple of months ago and one of the sponsors owns a ziplining company in the Hocking Hills. I brought some info home about it, talked about how fun it would be to go ziplining, and that was pretty much it.
A couple weeks later, he told me that we were going to hang out with his sister's family down in Athens. I got excited because I love her 2 little boys, and the FI and I got on the road at around 8 am and he kept pestering me to eat breakfast on the way. I kept saying "Let's just stop at Sonic, it's on the way and that's really the only time we ever eat it!"
Well before we got to the Sonic, he pulled off on this tiny road and there was a little sign advertising a ziplining course. I was confused and asked if we were going ziplining and he said yes and then I asked if the kids were coming too...because quite frankly the thought of a 1 and 2 year old in the air above the trees made me QUITE nervous. He just laughed and said he saw how much I wanted to try ziplining, so he decided to surprise me. Ummm, cutest thing ever, no?
So we get all geared up and one of the tour guides asked him to hang back, saying that my FI forgot to sign some paperwork. I tried to hang back and wait for him, but the other tour guide scooted me along and said that they would catch up to us. So we went through the first half of the course and had a blast!
At the midway point, the line is set up in such a way that you can't see the next landing, and they have a photographer there take everyone's picture as they come across. The tour guide told my FI to go first, and then the other groups to go after, leaving me for last. I started to suspect something was up, because until that point, all the people who were together in a group went across consecutively.
Here I come, flying down the zipline and there he is at the landing, on one knee with a ring box. Of course I start crying and he tells me to take off my gloves so that he can put the ring on and everyone else in the group does the collective "Aaawwwwww.” The photographer took several more pictures of us, and then we finished the rest of the course. I was kinda bummed because I had to put the glove back on over my gorgeous ring. The proposal was perfect. I was hot and wearing a harness and a helmet, but it was so sweet and romantic and different. I mean, really, he proposed to me in a tree…which I think says a lot about how our lives together will be :-D
The ring is perfect and so me. It has diamonds from his mother’s wedding ring, sapphires (my birthstone) from his grandmother’s ring, is very low profile, and not too traditional. We looked at rings several months ago and he filed away everything I said I liked/disliked, until he got a chance to work with a jeweler and create a custom ring for me. Now, we’re about a month into the engagement and it’s time for the planning to begin in earnest!