Our Adventure Begins!

We actually "met" about 8 years ago, shortly after Bryant started at Equitable in the Dallas office. Carrie worked in the Equitable Fort Worth office, and we crossed paths professionally a few times. In 2018, we started hanging out in work groups doing various fun things like pool days and cook outs. The groups got smaller and smaller - until there was just the two of us! We totally bonded over our love of adventure and have found that we are both up for pretty much anything related to the outdoors. We went camping, fishing, hiking, boating, wakesurfing, biking, running, and Bryant learned a lot about horse shows! We started dating in July 2019 and were engaged in October of 2020.

This is such a great story! We had been talking about getting married for a few months, and had even done the "Merge" class together at Watermark church, for seriously dating couples. Over the summer of 2020 we discussed going to Bryant's home state of Michigan in the fall, because Carrie grew up in Nebraska and had never really seen "fall colors". Around September 1, 2020, Bryant announced we should definitely book the trip on some very specific dates, (10 days hence), and a flustered Carrie booked the flights, wondering all the while "why did we wait to do this so last minute?!" LOL His pretence was that the fall colors "would only be great on these dates" and sure enough, the colors were amazing when we arrived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We had a fantastic 9 mile hike the first day and Carrie couldn't believe the colors! The second day we hiked to Pictured Rocks, along the beach, with Bryant toting a ridiculous tripod that Carrie kept asking him about - "why do we need this, we look like tourists?!" Carrie discovered afterwards that Bryant had been purposely annoying her with the tripod for several days so that she would stop noticing him messing around with it. As we reached the beach, Bryant departed down another path to "see the view from that angle" and Carrie plopped down with some snacks. Wearying of said snacks after about 30 minutes, Carrie departed to find Bryant and came upon him wrestling with the tripod, which he said he was doing to take a great picture of some specific tree along the lake. We found a nice log on the beach to sit on, and Bryant went down on one knee in the sand and proposed! Unbeknownst to her, he had been carrying the ring around in his pocket for two days and had been taking pictures of him holding it when Carrie was hiking ahead of him on the trail. Needless to say, Carrie said YES. The “ridiculous tripod” recorded the entire thing!