Weddingbee Blog

Our first year anniversary was a very special one. We had spent the previous month examining our relationship (aka fighting) and trying to figure out what our relationship meant. For two weeks we didn’t speak to each other to see what we really wanted. Luckily each of us realized that what we wanted was the other person. Our first anniversary was a time of celebrating and recouping from weeks of nonstop emotional drama.

I knew that my fiance had something special planned for our anniversary, but he wanted it to be a surprise. A few days before our anniversary, I returned from my lunch break to find a “Packing List” on my desk. He had snuck into my office while I was out to place it there. On the list was a wide array of items-bathing suit, hiking boots, sweater, flip flops, shorts, thermals, little black dress, sunblock-and immediately my coworker, who is now one of my bridesmaids, and I began trying to figure out where my fiance was taking me.

I don’t do well with surprises and I always try my darnedest to figure them out. To appease me I got a clue every day, including a recording on my voicemail of the Little Mermaid’s “Les Poissions,” which I was able to figure out meant we were going to a French restaurant and since there aren’t too many good French resturants in DC I was able to narrow it down to three resturants. (It killed him that I was able to figure that much out and since then I’ve never been allowed clues.)

On Friday he picked me and my huge suitcase up at my apartment and we went to a wonderful French restaurant (I was right too, it was one of the three I suspected!). After dinner we got back in the car and he started driving. It took about 30 minutes for me to realize that we were heading towards the ocean. Late that night we arrived at a beautiful bed and breakfast on the beach and spent the weekend swimming, sunning, and relaxing. The packing list had a bunch of “decoys” so that I wouldn’t know where we were going.

After dinner on Saturday he gave me my anniversary gift, a beautiful leather bound journal. I remember thinking that it was a nice gift, but I don’t keep journals. And then he produced another small box and explained the two gifts were related and that I could use the journal as a travel diary. I opened the box and inside was two plane tickets to Rome!* Of course, I used the journal to write about our amazing trip to Italy. And the journal has come on every trip we have taken together. It’s coming with me on our honeymoon.

*My fiance’s friend is a travel agent and she printed two fake plane tickets to Rome with no date so that my fiance and I could plan a time when we could both get off of work.