We eloped!

We met 10 years ago in a military history class in college (romantic, right?). In between learning about the military campaigns of D-Day, we became friends. Nick was interested. Andrea was interested but oblivious. Then the class went to Normandy for a spring break travel portion of the class. After a few days of exploring the battle sites, the region was hit by the worst blizzard since 1945. We were snowed into our hotel. Just a bunch of stranded American college kids, a French bartender playing the role of an amusingly snarky Cupid, and a LOT of booze. The universe seemingly pushed us together. But nothing came of it until... Our group finally shoveled its way out of Normandy and headed to Paris. On our last night there, we split from the class and took a nighttime stroll to the Arc de Triomphe. Under the sparkling lights of Paris, we had our first kiss. Then Nick announced, “When we get back to the States, I'm taking you out.” The rest was history.

Almost immediately, we were doing long distance. When Andrea left to study abroad in Scotland, Nick saved up his summer money to visit her. When Nick graduated college in 2014 and moved back to Massachusetts, we visited each other as much as possible. In 2016, Nick became a Naval officer and was stationed in Rota, Spain. From 2016 to early 2021, we made international long distance work for us. It wasn't easy, but having each other (despite the distance) was infinitely better than not having each other. And meeting up for yearly trips throughout Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Germany and Austria was pretty sweet! In January 2021, Nick left active duty and moved back to the DC area and moved in with Andrea. We got engaged in September, bought our first home in October, and moved in December. As much as we wanted to get married, 2021 brought a lot of huge life changes for us and a big wedding didn't feel right for us. Which led us to....

Wedding planning was stressing us out. On a normal night in February 2022, we had a candid talk about the wedding. We realized it was causing more stress than excitement for us. After almost 10 years of waiting for each other, that wasn't the response either of us wanted to be having! Andrea said "I'd marry you tomorrow in Vegas if you wanted!" It was a joke. Sort of. Perhaps a little bit of a dare. The way Nick's face lit up at the thought of eloping to Vegas was enough to convince both of us: we wanted to elope to Las Vegas. Two months later, on April 8, 2022, we were standing in front of a heart-shaped altar, saying Elvis-inspired vows and being married by a female Elvis impersonator. It was the most magical moment of the most magical day of our lives. We're so thankful to our family and friends for their excitement and support of us and we wanted to share photos and videos of our day with you.