A Surprise in a Surprise - New York and a Proposal...
Where to start, well I guess I will start at the beginning when Rene (my then boyfriend) told me to get all my classes covered for a week in September, he had a trip planned. Once when we were in grade 12 he had planned a surprise trip for us to Vancouver and has hung on to that as proof of how sweet he is to me for 11 years, yes we have been together since high school (with a good amount of breakups thrown in when we were younger). Anyway, I knew nothing about the plans other than the dates and that I would need my passport, the night before we left i got to see the weather forecast and we packed our bags together. No bathing suit needed, this crushed my secret hope that we were going to the tropics, ocean side chillin. That’s the thing about expectations, I had a little moment of mourning the beach vacation I had made up with my head and moved on to this new adventure which had a good amount of yoga apparel, a need for running shoes, and an expectation I would be ready to run a minimum of 5 km.
I found out where we were going at 5:30 am when checking in the Westjet lady proclaimed JFK how exciting! There we were off to New York. Even better Rene had found a one day Wanderlust Festival; a 5km run, meditation lead by Elena Brower, Yoga class taught by Seane Corn, and music and dancing with MC Yogi and DJ Drez!
Rene had booked our accommodations, tickets to the taping of Seth Myers, and had gotten familiar with the layout of the city, together we filled in the gaps. Two off Broadway shows, lots of eating out, yoga, partying, a touch of shopping, and a lot of sightseeing.
Then came the surprise in the surprise… On our way to Phantom of the Opera we stopped at Jack’s a lovely restaurant for dinner, in Time Square it is not the easiest thing to find great restaurants catering to vegans plus we were running late so Jack’s it was. We sat down and Rene spent several minutes on his phone, he had to work from time to time so I let it slide till I said “whatcha doin” and he replied “I am glad you asked” from there he proceeded into yes a proposal. Which he half read off his phone as he didn’t want to forget anything.
Now you might be thinking well 11 years it’s about bloody time, but those close to me are more like, what I thought you were never getting married; and you are both right. There is much about marriage that bothers me and so I had Rene convinced it wasn’t necessary, we have a house, a dog, and an entire life together, what do we need the archaic tradition of marriage for; I wasn’t much feeling my dad giving me away or becoming Rene’s property. However over the last year or so Rene had been mentioning that he would like us to share a last name, be unified as a couple, make a formal commitment to one another, and I had come around to the idea of ceremony and the honest communicated commitment to something bigger than us.
Still I had given him no clues on rings or that I would even say yes to this notion. But I did, and on Sept 12th we chose to make things more official and start planning a 
wedding.
New York was good to us, great weather, great entertainment, and lots of love.
With love
Chelsea Ray