An island vacation, an announcement and a wedding

Let's start with the announcement part first, as this is what I'm most excited about: Jaimee and I are now engaged! Yes, after spending 298 days on our trip, essentially together 24 hours a day, we have now decided to spend the rest of our lives together as well. Probably not constantly together like we have been the past year, but together nonetheless.

I proposed (and she said yes, by the way) while riding on the ferry from Vineyard Haven, Martha's Vineyard to Woods Hole, Cape Cod. It might seem anti-climactic to have traveled all the way around the world and come back to Massachusetts to propose, but that's how it worked out. We both love ferries - one of our first official dates was a ferry trip to Whidbey Island in Washington - so it seemed appropriate, even if it wasn't what you would call exotic. Here we are right after proposal:

From Martha's Vineyard

We were coming off a wonderful three days on Martha's Vineyard visiting with my Aunt and Uncle, Betsy and Neil. They rented a house on Chappaquiddick, a small island off the eastern side of Martha's Vineyard. Neither Jaimee nor I had been to Chappaquiddick (also called Chappy) before (although she'd been to Martha's Vineyard several times) so it was a great continuation of our trip, visiting places we'd never seen.

Chappy is, unfortunately, most famous for the "Chappaquiddick incident" involving Ted Kennedy in 1969 when he drove off a bridge and crashed his car in a river, killing the passenger riding with him. For some reason I pictured a huge tall bridge, but in fact the bridge was a tiny little overpass. My uncle Neil and I rode our bikes out to see Dyke bridge:

From Martha's Vineyard

Back in 1969 it apparently did not have any guard rails, but still, pretty interesting that such a little bridge could cause such a big accident. History lesson included, we had a wonderful time on Martha's Vineyard. We toured around the main island on our bikes as well, and actually had pretty decent weather for mid-June.

Next on our agenda was a wedding. We went up to Gloucester, Massachusetts for Jaimee's cousin's wedding. It was interesting to go to a wedding so soon after getting engaged as I looked at the wedding in a slightly different light, somewhat with an eye of what I might want to do or not do. This wedding was a blast (providing many more "dos" than "don'ts"), although it was possibly a bit fancier than I think Jaimee and I would plan. It was a lot of fun to meet many of Jaimee's relatives on her mom's side of the family, and with gorgeous sunny days we had fun exploring Gloucester and Rockport during the day before the actual ceremony and reception. The wedding was at the beautiful Ocean View Inn (where we also stayed for the nights before and after the wedding), situated, as you might guess, right on the water, which enabled us to go out and snap some family photos right along the water:

From Martha's Vineyard

The end of our week-long getaway was a stop back in Shrewsbury to have lunch with Jaimee's grandparents and then later dinner with Jaimee's father and step-mother in celebration of father's day. This was a great cap to the week, celebrating Father's Day with my new family-to-be. I'd actually never celebrated Father's Day before (a semi-long story which I don't need to get into on this blog) but I enjoyed starting what I hope to be a long tradition of many more to come. I'm happy to be marrying into Jaimee's wonderful family and I'm sure the two of us will continue to have more adventures in the years ahead.