How We Met

As Christine and I will be celebrating our eight wedding anniversary on April 7^th, I thought that I would share the story of how we met. My apologies for those of you already familiar with it, if you don’t wish to hear it again, then please skip this post.

I was looking through our global address book at work (within our email systems) and I happen to run across Christine’s name in it. This email system at the time let you know what home server was for the company employees contained within the global address book and I noticed that she was listed on a server that I thought had to be in Germany. I decided to write her an email that stated something like you’re probably wondering who I am and that I thought it would be nice to have a penpal in Germany. A little time passed (including recovery from an inline skating accident) before Christine answered my email.

We exchanged several emails, snail mails, phone calls, and then she decided to use some of her vacation time to come meet me. She booked a flight to see me and then was going to fly to visit an aunt in California. One of her friends asked if she was afraid that I might turn out to be some serial killer or something, to which she replied that wasn’t who I was.

We packed a lot of things into Christine's visit. We took a nice trip to Chicago, a stayed at a nice bed and breakfast in Luddington, and a wonderful bed and breakfast on Macinac Island. I took her to one of the annual Heron Family reunions/picnics, pretty brave on her part when I think about it, as my dad comes from a family of nine and so there were usually a lot of people at these events. I took her to see one of the last baseball games at Tiger Stadium. Between vacation days and weekends we spent 10 days together on that trip, then it was on to California to visit her aunt.

Immediately after she left my sisters and mom let me know that I should not let her go and I started thinking about visiting Christine that Christmas. I also decided that I would purpose while the fireworks were going off and 2000 was a brand new year.

I arrived a Frankfurt airport on Christmas Eve, 1999. A little later we drove to Christine’s mother’s apartment for a visit. Ilona, Christine’s mom, had taken a beginning English class to be able to talk to me and she worked out this nice little “Welcome to Taunusstein” speech, something that I found really neat. To test the waters so to speak, I had gotten Christine a necklace, placed it in a ring box, and presented it to her as a Christmas present. Both Christine and her mom were relieved when the box was opened and it was only a necklace! I attended a Christmas Eve service in a church in the little village that Christine’s Aunt Marion lived and I met some of Christine's family. At this point I was feeling the effects of jet lag, the time difference, and lack of sleep, so that might have all factored in to make things larger than life, but they were larger than life for me.

We did some nice trips and spent some good quality time together before New Year’s Eve was upon us. We went off to see the fireworks over Wiesbaden prior to 12pm. Immediately after the New Year had started, with fireworks still going off fast and furious, in a quite moment I told Christine that I had forgotten to give her a Christmas present that it was in my coat pocket, if she would pull it out. She pulled out the ring box, opened it up and at this time I had gotten on one knee and purposed. She immediately said yes. She showed her mom the ring and they both cried together. Later on Christine had told me when I had given her the ring box earlier she was really hoping that it wasn’t a ring inside, but by the time New Year’s Eve had come there wasn’t any doubt in her mind about if she would say yes or not. Christine planned a New Year’s Eve party for me so all of us went back to her apartment and continued the celebration. I sent off an email to some friends and family to tell them that Christine had said yes.

I'll be posting the story or our wedding after I have a chance to finish writing it, so stay tuned. If you like blog, feel free to add us to your rss feed or subscribe via email. We welcome your comments. The picture in this post is one that I recently put together in honor of our anniversary, it is a collage of various wedding pictures that we have.