The Wedding Capital of the World

The romance continued nicely throughout the rest of 1997, with me spending 90% of my time at Dara's large house out in the country. After a couple of weeks I even took the step of moving my satellite dish from my house to her's! (she was only receiving one channel (NBC) over the air). One weekend we decided to spend the afternoon in touristy Solvang pretending we were Danish. Mmmmm Danish! We were eating at an outdoor cafe when the topic of moving in together came up. We both agreed that it would be a good idea, and decided to make the big move sometime in January of 1998. Since I owned my condo and she was renting the house we decided that she would move into my house. I've only moved a few times in my life, but boy does it suck! We soon found that we were going to have to do a LOT of thinning out since we both had full sets of furniture, washers and dryers, refrigerators, 3 VCR's between us, and an unimagineable number of cordless phones! We started out with a large storage unit, whittled it down to a small one, then finally got rid of it altogether.

In March of 1998 I decided that I wanted Dara to be my wife, so I consulted with a local jeweler who had made jewelry for her in the past about an engagement ring. A couple of days later, he called me and said that he had something ready. It was Tuesday, March 31st, 1998 when I picked up the ring. I was going to wait until the weekend, go to a nice restaurant and propose over dinner but I'm an impatient man. We decided to go out for dinner that night at our favorite restaurant, a cozy little Mexican restaurant called Vallarta's in Pismo Beach. I was able to keep my nerves in check throughout the meal, then as we were finishing up I started fishing around in my pocket saying, "Oh, I almost forgot, I got something for you!" A couple of days earlier she had asked me to pick up a bumper sticker from the radio station at which I work, and she assumed that I was pulling out the sticker. I handed her the ring in one of those little velvet boxes, she opened it, then we both started crying. I managed to blubber out a "Will you marry me?" and thankfully she nodded in the affirmative!

A few weeks later, we started discussing the nuts and bolts, and I eagerly brought up the idea of getting married in my favorite town, which just happens to have a number of wedding chapels liberally scattered throughout the city! She thought that sounded like a good idea, and we decided to make it exactly one year from when I proposed, March 31st, 1999.