Sometime in early April 2014 I had just returned from a year of travel and after being unemployed for 6 months decided I should probably start to look for a job. After dropping my resume at a couple of local hotels, I walked into the DoubleTree and asked to speak with a manager. We ended up talking for about 20 minutes and I was told they unfortunately weren't hiring. I left determined to keep looking. About 5 minutes later I received a call from the DoubleTree manager asking me to come back for a formal interview. Needless to say I killed the interview and started my new job at the front desk 1 week later. After a couple of months Jared was transferred out of the hotel and we could officially start dating. Although we may argue about what constituted as our "first date" we do have multiple anniversary's that we can agree upon. Everyday we continue to learn and grow in our relationship and I'm so grateful that we share a love of travel, food and spending quality time with family and friends.

When I first met Katie I knew that she was someone special. The circumstances we met under might seem a little cliché - I might have been a hiring manager, and she might have been applying for a job at the hotel I was working at. As fate would have it, we worked together for a number of months, getting to know each other in the context of a coworker friendship. However, it began to become clear that we had more of a connection, and with work taking me out of the hotel and on the road for a few months we started "dating". Being apart from my family in Hawaii, I was fortunate that Katie introduced me to her family, and I am grateful that they welcomed me into their home. Building a relationship with Katie's family felt like being with my own family and has restored the value of 'ohana in my life. The combination of Katie's strong family values and my own desire to be with my family helped make it clear that I wanted both Katie's family and my own family to be involved in our eventual engagement. As the Spice Girls once said, "if you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends" and my friends play a huge part in my life. In our time dating, traveling with friends as well as traveling to visit friends and seeing Katie instantly fit in with my group of close friends I knew that Katie was someone I could see spending the rest of my life with. One of our shared values was travel; we both found ourselves working in the hospitality industry as a result of our passion for travel. When we met, Katie had been to 26 countries, and our love of travel pushed us to visit China, Japan, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan to exceed Katie's goal of visiting 30 countries before her 30th birthday. Thankfully, my love of Disney grew on Katie as well, and we have had a blast at Tokyo Disney Sea, Disney World, and Disneyland together. Many ask why we chose a destination wedding, but we couldn't imagine a better way to merge our love of family, friends, and travel.