We'd been in Florence for around four days and it was cold - it had been four days of wearing the same clothes, which meant we'd been wearing all of our clothes. It really was so cold that at one point we'd noticed that the locals were wearing pairs of underwear under their woolen hats. But we were still having a fantastic time. Originally, we'd planned this trip for early November. Immediately after Hilary had flown to Iraq in July we'd began tossing around ideas of a vacation we could both take together. We settled on Italy in early November, when the harvest is finishing up and truffle season is under way. Supposedly, it's a time of tasty eats, food festivals, and general merriment.

Instead, I went to Pakistan to go save dying babies in the steep, frozen Himalayan mountains. Hilary, being the bleeding heart that she is, understood that the Pakistani people needed me, and so we postponed what was to be our first time seeing each other since she left. It wasn't until mid-December that things got back on track.

I'd flown from Islamabad, via Dubai, via Karachi. We met at the airport in Amman, Jordan. We then promptly boarded a flight to Rome for a night (had pizza, a bottle of wine, and left the next morning - nothing more). Then flew to New York, changed planes, flew to Salt Lake City, rented a car, drove an hour and a half north, got in an accident, drove another half an hour north, met her parents and brother, celebrated Christmas, bought them off with a rug, then drove back to Salt Lake City, flew to Atlanta, then Rome, and began our Italy trip, eventually making our way to Florence, where my story really starts to take shape, on January 2nd, 2006.

We'd been wandering nearly aimlessly around the city for a few days, and our trip was quickly coming to an end. As I'd previously mentioned, we were cold. This particular night, we were out looking for a place to have a nice dinner. I'd been intending on proposing sometime during this trip, but I really had no idea how, and didn't have a ring. I didn't even know what size finger she had. So as we're walking in no particular direction, I figured that it had to happen sometime that night. It probably would have sucked if I hadn't decided to propose until we're boarding planes to fly back to our respective non-pig eating countries. Thus, as we walked, I decided to steer her towards the river. Rivers are nice, they look neat, and I thought it might make a decent place to do whatever it was I was going to do next.

We got over to the river but there's no way to get to the river. No walkway, no strip of green and a path...just a bunch of buildings clinging onto the river bank. Maybe it looks romantic from the river, but where we were at, it was not very romantic. I then thought that maybe I'd find some cute little square with a fountain, because Italian law dictates that every town must have two per square kilometer. We hung a left and walked down the street in from the river: Borgo San Lacopo, between the Ponte a Santa Trinita and the Ponta Vecchio. Ponte means something along the lines of "bridge". Well, maybe not, but in my mind, it should. We're walking along, its dark, and its cold, there's some graffiti on the wall, and no restaurants. No fountains either. But lo' and behold! I peeped a little entrance way to a hotel, which had a little section with some plants that overlooked the river. That would work.

I think I dragged Hilary over there on some pretense of "maybe it is a restaurant" or "let's go take a picture". Whatever I said, it worked, and there we were: Hilary standing there looking out at the river and me standing there racking my head on what to do next. That whole knee thing? Heck, it isn't like I took some high school class on "The Ethics of a Proposition". I just kept standing there. Eventually if you stand someplace long enough, something happens. Sooo...I stood there some more.

After a good amount of time, something did happen. The water in the river went by, some cars drove by, and some folks walked in and out of the hotel. I also told Hilary I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, and after a slight pause, the "will you marry me?" part.

She said yes.