Sarah saw it coming. So much so that she wrote a letter marked Spring (Break) 2018 predictions to see how accurate she was. J R was unintentionally dropping hints left and right, but he had first set things in motion earlier in the year. He still had a few surprises up his sleeve…

But he wasn’t going to make it easy. In true J R fashion, he had a plan: set up Sarah’s future Spikeston email account and withhold the password until she solved a series of puzzles.

On our long road trip to Florida to drop off Nika and get ourselves to Costa Rica for Spring Break, J R handed Sarah a note with instructions.

It involved…

First, finding the 5th and 9th most frequent letters on a crossword puzzle of all our relationship inside jokes, dates, and values.

Second, the number of Google calendar invites he had sent minus the number she had sent.

Third, our most frequently used emoji in our text conversations in Unicode hex.

Fourth, the sum of the longitude and latitude of our first kiss.

Together, these four things formed the new password to get into Sarah’s Spikeston email where a Google Calendar invite titled “Marry Me? 💍” was waiting.

She of course said yes (after all, we’ve basically been planning this wedding for months already!). He pulled over just outside of the Mississippi/Alabama border and whipped out the ring.

We stopped at Dauphin’s in Mobile, AL to celebrate where J R had arranged for private dining on the 34th floor with panoramic views of the city at night.

And that was that! The two continued happily on to Costa Rica and finished their trip by swinging by Greenville, SC to participate in another one of J R’s surprises: a wedding ring workshop where we made each other’s wedding rings from scratch under the tutelage of a master jeweler.