First, we want to thank everyone that participated and took the time to submit their story to us.  We loved reading all of them and yes they all brought a tear to our eye.  We are truly blessed to work with such wonderful, caring and amazing couples.  It is truly an honor to be your wedding photographer and follow you on this journey as you begin a new chapter in your life.  It’s couples like these that make our job so fulfilling and fun.  So thank you to all of you.

Ok so now to the winner .   It is our Dallas couple Nathan and Laura or couple #1.  Congrats to you!!!  You will receive a 20 page coffee table book  and a 16×20 canvas print.  We are so excited to be your wedding photographers for your June wedding.

Here is their story again.

Couple #1

Since we practically grew up together, our “story” is more like a novel. We met and started dating at 16, went to the same high school, he followed me to college in Arkansas, I followed him on a semester in Holland, graduated, moved back to Texas, got jobs, adopted our puppy, cried happily during a snowy Christmas morning proposal, and began planning our wedding. And now you’re caught up! So maybe it’s not quite a novel, after all.

With that out of the way, I’ll tell you about the day I realized I was definitely, for sure, no question going to marry him.

(Side note – I asked him when he “knew,” and his typical guy answer was, “I dunno.” I like to translate that as, “Always, honey. I just always knew you were the one!” Hehehehe!)

Back to my story. During our semester in the Netherlands, we were lucky enough to visit several amazing cities. We have incredible memories from our trips to Amsterdam, Paris, Rome and Barcelona. I’m a compulsive planner, so I always made multiple copies of all our travel arrangements to prevent any issues. We had never really travelled alone before, and I was relieved when our trips were fun and relatively problem-free. Our last big excursion was to London where we met with two of our other classmates, who were also in Europe for the semester. It was one of the best weekends I’ve ever had. We rode the double-decker buses around town, cruised the River Thames, made a hilarious video in Trafalgar Square, saw Buckingham Palace, shopped at Harrod’s, hit the museums and even went on a ghost tour/pub crawl! This trip was made even better because we were much more confident (too confident) in our newly-acquired travel skills. Heck, I had even forgotten to make copies of our travel arrangements and everything was going just fine!

On the morning of our flight back to Amsterdam, he asked me, “we’re leaving from Gatwick Airport, right?” I told him that no, it was Stansted. I suggested that we use the hostel’s internet cafe to confirm before we left, but he agreed that it was Stansted. When we arrived, we searched the departures board to see if there were any delays, we couldn’t find our 9:30AM flight to Amsterdam. For those who travel often, this situation was more of a frustrating annoyance than anything world-ending. But we were barely 20 years old, and on another continent, *GASP* – we might be late for class! I immediately started to get very nervous. Not just nervous – frozen. I couldn’t think of anything except, “why didn’t I print out the flight info?” But with multiple curse words added in. However, my wonderful boyfriend stayed calm as he used a pay-per-minute airport computer to confirm that we were at the wrong airport.

Now he will admit that, usually, I’m the logical, let’s-think-this-through half of the couple. Not this day. My suddenly irrational mind decided that we should take a shuttle to Gatwick, which was clear on the other side of the city, during rush hour on a Monday morning. I was trying to convince him of my pathetically hopeless plan when he decided to walk up to the ticket counter of the airline on which we were supposed to fly. He came back, smiled and told me that we could change our flight to one from Stansted for a fee only slightly more than the shuttle would cost!

He was my hero. I finally started to relax, and my heart wasn’t trying to beat out of my chest anymore. And as he went back to the ticket counter to change our flights, I suddenly realized what should have been obvious for years. It’s OK if things go wrong because I’ll have him there to help me fix them. When I’m down, he can pick me up. And I can do that for him, too. I was smiling when he walked back with our new tickets, but not just because we were still going to make it to campus in time for afternoon classes. I was beaming because I knew that one day, years away, when we were ready, we’d get married and share a lifetime fixing our screw-ups. Together.