Rome is hot in June and we enjoyed dining "al fresco", so we decided to have a later dinner after it cooled off. One thing most people know about me is that I need to eat often and if I don't I get a tad "hangry". So I asked, "What time do you want to eat?" We talked about 7:30 so I felt I was in good shape. We left the hotel room around 7:15pm and were having a hard time deciding on a place. I really wanted to eat outside for the last night, but all the places we were finding were heavy into seafood, which we are not. I was starting to get desperate, but J kept steering me towards Trevi Fountain. It was always the plan to end up there after dinner (you have to toss in a coin to ensure a return to Rome someday), but I wanted to eat now not later. We ended up walking to Trevi Fountain and checking out the restaurants in the area. We finally found one that satisfied our needs "Locanda Giulietta e Romeo". We had a great dinner and enjoyed some shopping afterwards, before heading to Trevi Fountain. J insisted we get through the crowds to the right corner, which struck me as odd because there wasn't an exit from that corner of the fountain, but I didn't want to argue. We made our way to the fountain's right side and made our wishes. He asked another tourist if they could take our picture before we left. As she was taking our picture, he reached into his pocket and said something. All I saw was the ring and his face and I started to tear up. "Are you serious??" (He was.) After a pause.... he said, "so is that a Yes?" .... "Yes!" I said, we hugged, the stranger took our pictures and the wishes came true! P.S. - We also have three Polaroids from a pushy Italian man trying to earn a few Euros (that is another story)!

“I’m ok with a later dinner, as long as its sitting down at 8 and not, starting to look for a place to eat at 8:30” she said. Uh oh. I thought. That means the 9pm romantic dinner I had in my head probably wasn’t going to play out the way I thought. Jen and I are usually good about timing, not naturally mind you, but through careful conversation, we’re usually able to sync our rhythms and stay on each other’s wavelength. That is, with almost everything, but food. We had planned to turn our last night in Rome into a fun evening out, revisiting a few of our favorite spots, enjoying a fancy dinner out and finishing the night with a quick trip back to Trevi fountain. Jen had heard that in Rome, you toss a coin in Trevi fountain to ensure a safe return to Rome in the future. Trevi fountain was the key to my plans for our last night in Rome as well, but as I recognized that our timing was off, getting Jen back to Trevi fountain may end up proving trickier than expected. As I hustled to get us out of the hotel room, Jen walked out on to the street and took an immediate left. Trevi fountain is to the right. She had remembered seeing a few cute restaurants on our afternoon adventures and wanted to look and see if any might be a good place for dinner, far a way from Trevi fountain. . . There’s that tension in a moment that is important to you, where you know things aren’t going to go as planned. You have a choice, you can fight the inevitable, or you can call an audible, and hope that the new plan is better than the old. My mind raced, ‘we’ll be too far away, after a full dinner, she’s not going to want to walk that far, if we don’t make it to Trevi, what do I do?’ My audible, was letting Jen find her way back to Trevi. With a few well-timed hints, we began meandering back toward the fountain and after much scrutiny found a wonderful little restaurant called Locanda , just outside Trevi square.

After dinner we did a little sight-seeing, we picked up a few last-minute souvenirs for our families. We wandered through the shops and made sure there wasn’t anything else to spend our Euros on. As the night grew on, Jen mentioned wanting to revisit a Pinocchio shop she had seen earlier to purchase a woodcarving she had noticed earlier. ‘Perfect’ I thought. I ducked into a shop under the guise of looking for some wine and slipped the ring out of my wallet. Carefully unwrapped it and slid it back into my pocket. We returned to Trevi fountain for what Jen thought would be simply an opportunity to throw our coins in for good luck. “Make a wish” I said. I made mine and we tossed are coins in the bubbling waters off in our private little corner. As she sat up, I handed my phone over to an unsuspecting passerby and asked her to take our picture. I turned back, I asked Jen “what did you wish for?”. She, of course, replied “I can’t tell you that!”. I asked, “Do you know what I wished for?” She said “no”. As I knelt on one knee I said “I wished that you’d say ‘yes’ . . . will you marry me?”. And just like every other nervous groom whose ever uttered those 4 words, I waited expectantly for the answer. Those loving words that every man hopes to hear cut through her surprise and into the air: “ARE YOU SERIOUS?” Ok, so maybe not exactly the sentiments every man expects to hear when he proposes, but after 10 years of courtship, I guess the shock might have caused a little bit of a delay in the reply I had hoped for. Then the delay started to creep into a painfully long silence. My heart beats a little quicker, my mind races. I’ve been planning this for over six months, we’ve been talking about this for many years. I thought for sure this was a no brainer, that her answer would come immediately. Was I wrong? I think to myself, ‘you know this isn’t a rhetorical question, right?’ and just as I start to mumble something incoherent about needing answer, she said “yes”.