A Hinge success story! We met through the dating app and instantly connected after realizing we had some amazing friends in common (thanks Ivette and Victor!). On our first date, we spent hours laughing and talking like we had known each other for years. We decided to meet for dinner at a Spanish tapas restaurant in Durham NC and things got off to a great start after Jonathan (trying to be cool as usual) ordered an expensive bottle of wine which turned out to be truly awful. We still laugh about it to this day. It didn't take long for us to realize how passionate we both are about traveling so the evening was filled with anecdotes from trips we had taken in years prior. At the end of the date we both drove home with butterflies in our stomach knowing we had just met someone special. Turns out, we were right!

After being in Pandemic lockdown for a year and a half, we finally headed on an epic trip to Iceland! Ashley really wanted to see the erupting volcano that had been active for 6 months but when we arrived it was eerily quiet and there was speculation that the eruption was officially over. Bummed, we continued driving our camper van around the ring road. The night before our last full day in the country, we heard the volcano had begun erupting again after a 9 day hiatus. It was 9pm and we u-turned to where we were headed and drove 2 hours to get to the volcano, hoping it wouldn't end before we had a chance to see it. Ashley was on a mission and death marched, Morgenstern-style, up two separate hikes until we got to the lava's edge around 2am. What a spectacular sight! It was like nothing we'd ever seen before and Jonathan on the spot decided to scrap whatever proposal plans he had for later in the year and popped the question. All the while, setting up the camera to capture an amazing engagement photo!