Due to the pandemic, we will now be having a more intimate ceremony with just our close families. We absolutely wanted everyone to be with us on our special day and hope that you will celebrate with us in spirit on August 8th even though we can't all be together.

We met in the fall of 2011, just a couple of weeks into our sophomore year at the University of Arkansas. A few of my girlfriends and I decided to go to the HPER to play racket ball. For those of you that know me, you'll find this highly suspicious, given I'm not exactly the "athletic" type (especially when it comes to hand eye coordination!). Really, the goal was to catch up with my more athletically ambitious friends after a long summer apart. After learning all of the racket ball courts were full, we traded in our racket ball gear for badminton equipment, but soon found none of the nets were set up. We went back to the equipment rental counter for a basketball instead, but the last court was taken by the time we made it back. Reluctant to go back to the equipment counter for a fourth time, we wandered aimlessly through the halls of the HPER. We passed by the climbing gym and decided to stop in to kill time before our next trip to the rental counter. It was Nik's second week on the job as a UREC climbing attendant, after his first summer away from Northwest Arkansas. He used a great pick-up line - "hi, I'm Nik" - and the rest is history.

This past spring, we took a trip to Great Smoky Mountains National Park to celebrate the end of a long busy season. After a rainy first night, we started out on a three night backpacking trip around Cades Cove just inside the park boundaries. When we got to the trailhead, the clouds disappeared to reveal a beautiful sunny day. We arrived at our campsite in the early afternoon and spent a glorious afternoon reading, fishing and napping in the hammock. In the evening after the sun had set, we were sitting next to a campfire, when Nik got up and walked off into the darkness. When he returned, he asked me to marry him, and I, of course, said yes!