Chase and I met around Christmastime in 2016. I was in Nashville for my friend Victoria's birthday, and he was home from Chattanooga for the weekend. Chase invited himself to tag along with his brother to Victoria's Christmas party, and we immediately hit it off. He will claim that he noticed me checking him out as soon as he walked in (true), but he made the first official move and struck up a conversation about Lexington. That night, we hung out around the fire pit outside talking about our hobbies and passions. The next night, Chase met the group out downtown and stole my heart with his killer dance moves. We officially started dating about a month later and dated long distance for a little less than a year before I made the move to Nashville.

Chase and I both love surprises. He says that I am hard to surprise, so his main goal with the proposal was that he wanted to succeed in surprising me. Mission accomplished! Even though I knew we would eventually get engaged, I was not expecting it to happen when it did. After a LONG hunting season August-November (any ladies dating hunters can give me an AMEN), Chase said that he wanted us to take a weekend trip to spend some quality time together. I jumped at the opportunity. We threw plans together for a short trip to San Diego the first weekend in December. A few people asked if I thought anything "special" was going to happen over the weekend, to which I laughed and told them that we "weren't getting engaged until next year." To be honest, even if Chase wanted to propose on this trip, I doubted he could get all his ducks in a row in such a short time (spoiler alert - I underestimated him). Our first morning in San Diego, we planned a run on the beach. About halfway through our run, Chase said he needed to stop to take a breather. When I went over to check on him, he pointed out a message in the sand: "Anna, will you marry me?" I turned toward him and he was down on one knee, holding a ring, asking me to spend the rest of my life with him. In shock, I screamed, "You're crazy!" multiple times before actually saying yes. He even recruited his childhood friend Jez (who lives in San Diego) to help him write the message and photograph the whole thing. It was absolutely perfect!