They met at an annual music festival in Charlotte, North Carolina. Jeff and his friends had met and made friends with a small group of people early at the festival, and decided to continue hanging out with them for the rest of the festival. Kayla and her friend had planned on meeting up with their other friends when they got to the festival. It just so happened that the group Jeff and his friends had befriended were the same group that Kayla and her friend had planned on meeting up with. They were introduced and it was not love at first sight. Kayla was talked into sitting on the shoulders of their 6'8" friend just to see the stage (a decision she immediately regretted, 5'2" is her comfort zone). Jeff was playing air guitar and possibly being a little obnoxious. It wasn't until the two of them turned a group conversation into more banter and less conversation. They both have a gift for repartee, and it was that spark of quick witted teasing, that sparked an attraction between them. They continued to joke and talk as if they new each other for years. In a place with 10,000 people it felt like it was just the two of them. At one point in the night Jeff turned to his friend Lane and said "I am going to marry this girl!" Kayla was confused by this statement and thought for sure Jeff was out of his mind. That statement ended up being the only thing he wasn't joking about the entire night.

On a weekend trip to Long Island to see family, We stopped into New York City to do a whole lot of sight seeing in a very short time. This was Jeff's first trip to New York so we had to do it right. We went from Wall Street, and made sure to see as much as possible, the freedom tower, little Italy, china town, SoHo, Greenwich village, the Empire State Building and more. Jeff even took his first subway. Not only did we go everywhere, we made sure to stop and get pizza, dirty water dogs, and all the other New York street food nobody should eat, to top off the tourist experience. I didn't know that Jeff had the ring in his pocket the whole day waiting for the right moment to propose. We finished off the night of tourism with dinner in time square at Tony's Di Napoli. Jeff was so nervous at dinner he started sweating and told me he wasn't feeling good. In reality he was just extremely nervous about proposing, So he didn't propose at dinner either. We were in the center of Time Square to take a picture, right after the picture was taken he dropped to one knee and with the attention of what felt like half of Time Square he proposed.