FROM HIM: I had my eyes on Liz for awhile. She mentioned wanting to go skiing since she didn't get to go while she lived in Dallas. Perfect. Easy first date. Drive up, ski for the day, have a few apres beers and see how things go. We pick a Saturday, and plans are in motion. The Friday before New England has its January thaw. It was 60 degrees and a monsoon outside. Temps were expected to drop starting around midnight and get into the teens the next day. I knew the skiing would be absolutely horrible, everything would be ice. What do I do, cancel the trip and ruin my chances. I decided to power through. I pick her up at 5:30am, and we start making the 3 hour drive up to Okemo. The father north we get the more ice there is on everything. The roads had pretty much flash froze, driving was white knuckle, tree branches were covered in ice. About an hour and a half into the trip I realize this was a bad idea but we continue trekking on. We get to the mountain around 9 and its a little empty. Not a lot of cars in the lot, and it doesn't appear the lifts are spinning. We start looking at the online mountain report. Every lift is closed, all the lift cables were frozen solid. What a disaster. We decided on grabbing some breakfast and wait a bit to see if the mountain opens. We have some food and chat for a bit. Around 10:30 we make the decision to drive home. Another 3 hours in the car. It actually was the perfect first date. We spent 6 plus hours together and things just flowed. It felt natural. I think we both knew it was the start of something special.

FROM HER: We were planning to spend the weekend down the cape with my family. I was excited because it was my birthday weekend, we got time off, and we were spending time with my fam! The drive ends up taking us 3 hours because it’s a summer weekend down the cape and there is tons of traffic of course. Thursdays are the new Friday, apparently. We had planned to go to dinner with Chris (my brother) and Whitney (sister-in-law and MOH) as just a night out with the 4 of us. I was texting Whitney the whole way down giving updates of when we would be there. We had reservations for 630 but because of the traffic we weren't actually going to get there till a little after 6. I still needed to change and get ready so I began stressing out. Whitney quickly changed the reservations and put me at ease. I then started to look at the menu and it looked like there were only seafood options and Mark and I both don't like seafood that much. I texted Whit again seeing if we could go to another restaurant so of course I am setting out to sabatage my own most special evening. They all knew though, yep that's right the Cunningham clan knew and were just waiting patiently for me to get to the house (little did I know).... Anyway, 10 minutes from the house Mark asks if I wanted to go to the beach to walk around a bit before we got there. I didn’t think much of it because he had been dealing with back issues over the summer and figured he just wanted to stretch out. We go to the beach at golden hour and everyone has already left so it was fairly empty. We weave in and out of the sand dunes which led us to a more private area. I was looking around taking pictures just enjoying the moment. I turned around and Mark was down on one knee. I screamed and cried and I said yes of course. The BEST DAY EVER! <3