We're getting married!

We met through friends within the first few days of our freshman year at UL (shoutout to Tyler and Joe!). As so many new students in college do, our group of friends clung together in this first year, so naturally, we ended up eating nearly every meal together in the cafeteria and hanging out every weekend. After awhile, the two of us started gravitating towards each other more and more. It was a big and pretty well-kept secret within our friend group when Ian developed a crush around Christmas of our freshman year. When we talked about it for the first time, it was already summer! McKenzie was really nervous about ruining our friendship, but we eventually decided it was worth giving it a shot since we enjoyed spending time with each other so much. We officially started dating in November 2017, and it's been such an adventure ever since!

After years of dreaming about what we thought the perfect road trip would be, we finally made it happen this summer! The two of us and our dog, Bandit, took off for Colorado. We knew we wanted to do lots of beautiful hikes, but in true McKenzie and Ian fashion, we didn't really plan anything ahead of time. So on our second morning in Colorado, when I woke up to Ian already awake with a full day planned, I was thrilled. He picked out a 7 mile hike called Herman Gulch that was supposed to be known for its wildflowers (something I'd been talking about wanting to see). He volunteered to pack up our backpack (looking back, I should have known this was suspicious), and we headed off. It was about 3.5 miles straight up a mountain, but it was the most beautiful scenery, with wildflowers in meadow sections, a rushing river, snow patches, and views of the surrounding mountains all around us. When we got to the top, we were greeted with a frozen over alpine lake with snowy peaks towering over us. Neither of us had ever seen anything like it. We hung out there for awhile and before heading back down, we decided to take a picture. Ian set up the phone on a boulder and said he hit video so we didn't have to keep running back up to the boulder to see if it got a good picture. Then, he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him. I still hadn't gotten over where we were, so the proposal came as a major shock to me. I believe the first words out of my mouth were, "Are you for real?!!!" It started raining on our way back down the mountain, but we were cheesing the whole way back anyway. We are so excited for this next chapter and so thankful for all of you coming to celebrate with us!