We had originally planned to return to Danielle's hometown of Haiku on Maui to celebrate our wedding, but the pandemic had other plans for us. We're lucky that we hadn't invested too much time or money on the Hawaii plans before things turned scary, but it was still quite emotional to cancel our dream wedding. We look forward to inviting you all out to Maui at some point in the not too distant future to celebrate life together. We're now very excited to be traveling to the dramatic high desert of Utah to get married with a very small group of immediate family and close friends. We know you all will be with us in spirit as we exchange our vows amongst the pink and red mesas of Castle Valley. And we'll be sure to share stories and pictures of our adventure with you all when we return home as husband and wife!

Luke and Danielle met on a hot Summer night in the most romantic of settings: one of Philadelphia's oldest and most notorious dive bars, Bob and Barbara's. This bar was a favorite hangout of Danielle's grad school classmates because it boasted cheap drinks and an atmosphere of gritty charm very true to the city of brotherly love. Luke had just moved to Philly to begin his orthopaedic surgery residency at Penn, and he was quite exhausted after a long day of building IKEA furniture. Before he called it a night, Luke received a text encouraging him to come out for drinks and reconnect with a group of local friends he had met while doing research in a Penn Med lab a few years prior. One of those friends also happened to be a grad school classmate of Danielle's, and so she was already at Bob and Barbara’s, completely unaware that she was about to meet her future husband. Luke got a second wind and decided he would go out for at least one drink, also completely unaware that he was about to meet his future wife. He and Danielle immediately clicked upon being introduced, and they proceeded to talk for hours over the clang of the live band as if no one else was in the bar. Luke was quick to follow up after that night and invite Danielle out for their first date. As they gear up for their wedding day, Luke and Danielle are so grateful to their mutual friend, the staff of Bob and Barbara’s, and to serendipity herself for bringing them together on that unassuming, but now unforgettable, night.

Our relationship was going strong as Luke’s residency was coming to a close in Philadelphia, so we decided that we would move together to wherever he matched for his year-long fellowship. He matched to a great program in Tampa, and shortly after we moved, he took me for a romantic weekend getaway down to Marco Island, under the guise of it being a birthday present (the Sunday of that weekend was indeed my birthday, so I bought the story). The weather was a bit stormy on the Saturday afternoon of our trip, so we decided to go out to the beach to watch the sunset that night, knowing that the cloud formations would make it pretty dramatic. We were right - it was one of the best sunsets we'd ever seen! Luke popped the question there on the beach just after the sun passed below the horizon, and it was perfect.

We've settled in Indianapolis where Luke got a great job as an orthopedic trauma surgeon with Indiana University Health Physicians, and despite the fact that our wedding was delayed multiple times, we've continued moving forward with big life steps as a couple. In November, we adopted a gorgeous shepherd named Maple from IndyHumane, and we're loving being pup parents already. And, we just bought a house! It's a big, beautiful old Tudor home, and we can't wait to make it our own this summer. We're also looking forward to planning our next adventure - a true honeymoon - to one of our bucket list travel destinations. New Zealand and Patagonia are at the top of that list to explore once it's safer to make a big trip. We're very thankful that we have so much to look forward in (what we hope will be) the better half of 2021 and beyond.