Narrated by Denise We met through our good friend, Erik, who invited us to go on a bike ride in the East Bay. I first saw Trevor sitting on a bench with Alicia (his bike) at Bart's 16th Street Station. After Erik and Poncho showed up, we all rode together that day and stopped for burritos at Taqueria Cancún afterwards. I ordered a Carnitas Burrito, and that's when Trevor knew that I was the one (I am very certain of this). Plot twist: we actually may have met in October 2014, when Erik and Trevor came to my house for a Halloween party. We just don't remember each other.

Narrated by Trevor Denise and I had been talking about leaving San Francisco to travel starting in 2019; however, the opportunity presented itself in 2018 and we took the leap. We sold or donated almost everything we owned and began our new life living out of our backpacks. Our travels were broken up into various chapters. The first chapter was spent in South America between September and December 2018. After spending the holidays in the US, we took off for Southeast Asia, where we spent mid-January through mid-May. At this point, Denise returned home to Venezuela for 6 weeks, while I went to East Africa and Egypt. We reunited in Barcelona at the beginning of July to begin the next chapter, bike packing around Europe. 3 months and 4,000 miles of pedaling later, we returned to Barcelona to get ready for the final chapter of our world travels, Nepal. We spent the majority of the next month trekking (and not showering) in the Everest region. After 15 months, we finally returned to the US, ready to figure out what post-extended travel life had in store for us. Bill Murray has a quote that we think does a great job capturing the spirit of our travels: “If you have someone that you think is The One, don’t just think in your ordinary mind, ‘Okay, let’s make a date, let’s plan this and make a party and get married.’ Take that person and travel around the world. Buy a plane ticket for the two of you to travel all around the world, and go to places that are hard to go to and hard to get out of. And if when you land at JFK and you’re still in love with that person, get married at the airport.” We didn't follow his exact steps, but he's right, if you can travel the world with your partner and come out the other side even more in love with them, that's a good sign that you're meant to be together.

Narrated by Denise By the end of our trip, in Nepal, Trevor floated the idea of getting engaged soon. He asked me if I wanted to be part of choosing a ring together. This was a bit "non-traditional," but I thought it was very thoughtful and reflected how our relationship is. We had a few extra days in Kathmandu, where we really didn't have any plans. So we did some browsing together, exchanged opinions and asked a few random jewelers around Thamel to measure my finger. We had plans of spending a week in San Francisco after we got back the U.S. and I had a hunch Trevor was going to propose during our time there. It turned out that he proposed exactly how I thought he would: "On a sunrise bike ride to the top of Hawk Hill" Yes, I was nervous from the moment I woke up and to this day it's been the only morning I didn't hit the snooze button. I may have known exactly how he was going to propose, but the truth is that if I had beat him to the question, I would've done it the exact same way he asked.

Narrated by Trevor After getting engaged in Dec 2019, we finished up the holidays and got serious about our job search and a return to "regular life" back in the Bay Area. While job hunting, we also started outlining our wedding and targeted Feb 2021 in Cartagena. We figured planning the wedding for one year out would give us ample time to comfortably plan while ramping up in new jobs and in a new home. Little did we know what was around the corner... During the first couple months of COVID we thanked our lucky stars that we scheduled our wedding all the way out in Feb 2021. We naively thought things would be normal enough by then and we wouldn't have to move our wedding the way so many others that had 2020 weddings had to. Fast-forward to Sept 2020 when it became clear that things were not going to be in a better place in time for our wedding. We had to make the difficult decision to push it out a full year to Feb 2022. While it was (and is!) important to us to have a wedding where all of our family and friends can come and celebrate with us, we didn't want to wait all the way till 2022 to officially get married. We decided we'd do a small COVID wedding in San Francisco with just our immediate family. On February 19th, 2021, we went with our families to the top of Hawk Hill and got legally married. Denise's sister, Michi, went through the arduous process of becoming ordained (took 5 minutes), and she officiated the wedding. In typical San Francisco fashion, it rained during the morning, we took couple's photos before the ceremony in the fog, and 5 minutes before the ceremony, the fog blew away to reveal sunny, blue skies and the Golden Gate Bridge as the backdrop. After the ceremony, we went back to the city and enjoyed a celebratory dinner at Foreign Cinema. While we loved our COVID wedding, and it's fun to call each other husband and wife, we can't wait to get married again in Cartagena on our one-year anniversary and celebrate with all of you!