The Proposal

We had now been together about 15 months and living together about 3.  We had talked about getting married  often so I wondered when we would get engaged.

One Friday morning he convinced me to phone in sick to work (he had already arranged with my boss for me to have the day off though!!) first he said we would just go away for a nice long weekend and I assumed he meant somewhere local as we had gone on weekend getaways before to places like Montville. However a cab pulled up out the front, and we went to the airport, he told me we were going on a mystery flight, so as we had both been busy at work I thought he had just planned a nice relaxing long weekend.

 The flight was to Melbourne and at the airport there was a chauffer waiting for us and a limo. We went to the Sheraton at Southgate (now the Langham) and checked in. He told me to get dressed up for dinner and we went downstairs to wait for our taxi and instead a horsedrawn carriage pulled up. We rode around the city at dusk and ended up in the botanical gardens, he then said to me did I know the reason we were doing all this, I said no and he said its all for you and then he got on one knee in the carriage and asked me to marry him. I said yes and bawled and then he gave me a ring box which had in it a yellow gold 3 stone diamond ring (.60 ct centre stone with .20 ct on either side)

We then went to dinner and my next surprise was the next night we had tickets to see Celine Dion at Crown (the song that became our song when we were dating was Because you loved me by Celine) flew back to Brisbane early Monday and went straight to work in a daze!! I was so overwhelmed at the planning and time he had put into making it such a special weekend - in some ways it was better than the wedding day!

In the horse drawn carriage just a few minutes after the proposal Jan 1998

One of our engagement photos