Adam and Jules’ Wedding proposal story….. here we go…..
Location: Vietnam, ~ 125k’s outside of Hoi An (ironically the honeymoon capital of Vietnam)
Temperature: 7,00,000 degrees and 492% humidity
Back Story (aka The Hill)
So we awake on day 10 of our journey through Vietnam, and after hitting a few snags along the way (the whole of Vietnam being flooded, possible malaria, days of dysentry-like bowel cleansing ….. you know, the usual), we reached the physical pinnacle of the trip, we reach the hill.
Now, before I go into the proposal story, I really must give you a description of this monster so you to can understand the pain that we suffered on this fine day. The hill is a 50km journey of pain, with 36km’s of all-uphill-pain and no flat sections. Riding on a (thankfully) quiet, newly bitumened stretch of turf, we excitedly, but nervously meet for a final photo at the bottom of the range before we head off into the wilderness.
After the first 12 kilometres, of which I was holding back with the back group (including Jules), I realised that to make this journey that it was going to be entirely about me, there simply wasn’t any space to cajole or support anybody else to the top, you just had to keep plugging through it.
And so slowly but surely, I broke away from the girls behind me, and soon realised that I was alone.
Now to place this into context, being on your own for even a few seconds when on a ‘group holiday’ becomes a fairly rare treat. As most of you would know who have traveled in groups, alone time is a wonderful yet short-lived space in time where you can finally be yourself and start to navel gaze endlessly, a favoured part of mylife. This usually occurs between when you drunkenly get home and when you promptly fall asleep. If you have a partner, it just ain’t happening.
… anyway, back to the story ….
So i’m on my own, and when on my own I take the opportunity to try to block out the relatively high levels of pain that are associated with riding up a big fucking hill, and after a few short kilometres my thoughts turned to my life, my work, my friends and everything that’s important to me. Now i’ll be honest, the thoughts that invaded my mind in those early kilometres on my own were about the significant changes that were about to occur in my work life, assessing my life now that i’d moved back to Sydney and the general twists and turns of being in the rat race and away from my friends and how I had changed. And for an hour it was great to reflect on the wonderful life that I have, the amazing friends who share it with me and the family (bless them) who understand that I will almost certainly be, always, nomadic.
Moving swiftly along to resolving those internal conflicts, I got to thinking about my happiness, and in turn I got to thinking about Jules and I and how she had very silently (almost literally) shown up in my life one night, half drunk at the Epping hotel where I (as I do) announced to the people in front of me that I was going to run the City2Surf (details of said City2Surf experience I thought were etched in stone in this blog, but apparently I was too busy getting drunk that night…) and this girl, who I didn’t really know (Hools) and another friend, (who I did know) said they’d join me and start training.
Now as with all drunk endeavours, one forgets these fairly soon after they occur, though early in the next week I receives this e-mail that I almost, sincerely, deleted as I thought it was SPAM (it was the last name that made it seem salacious, as with just one letter change would make her last name seem like more like a sex toy than a humans last name…), but for reasons still not known to me, I opened it and realised who it was.
It was Hools.
(now I digressed here for a second to make a point. As I realise now that knowing Hools (as I do now) means that had I not replied to that message she almost certainly wouldn’t have chased me down, spoken to me again after the incident or even mentioned it in passing and I could be heading home right now and drinking beer because i’d be single!)
…. So back to it (again) …..
And there she was, in my head and making me happy in a way that, while driving me completely batty at times for her complete lack of worry in the world, made me the happiest, sanest person I had been in many years… and didn’t ask me to change a thing.
Of course what I had done is change. Change in ways that are so much for the better. I am better with my friends, closer to my family and overall, I hope, a better person to know and be around. And in the swiftest of seconds, in the shortest moment that I can count to you, I simply knew.
I knew that Hools was the person I wanted to be with for the rest of my life.
Now, for someone like me, with a heart rate already going through the roof from the hardcore exercise, you’d think that this might set me into some kind of heart failure/early warning/resuscitation type scenario ….. meh?
But in fact the opposite happened. I found peace and calm in the world, and for the longest of moments, longer than I can imagine even now when I think about it, my world and everything around it stopped and that moment of clarity became a very long, very distant light over the horizon.
And I knew that I was home.
Riding up the rest of the hill was something that I will never forget. While it was hard physically, mentally and emotionally, I was committed to making it, committed to seeing Hools at the top and celebrating with her the most excited i’ve ever been about anything in my life.
Reaching the top of that mountain gave me a sense of accomplishment that made me (literally) jump around for joy. I was so excited I could barely contain myself.
Of course everyone else thought I was just a little too excited as I was 2/3rds of the way down the pack.
So after making it back to the hotel, excited and a little delirious we headed off to dinner. One of the group decided to drink far too much red wine and then decided to give several long, arduous speeches ranging from how great we all were, to how bad the wine taster over here and even as a tribute to his wife.
All the time i’m pushing my chair out inches away from the table, desperately trying to get a word in sideways (define irony!) and wondering if someone would kill me if I got up to speak (ed: someone did actually threaten that just moments before I climbed up to speak). But eventually I made it.
The worlds really just tumbled out of my mouth, though i’ve been told that I quoted about moments of clarity and moments of resolve combing together to define you as a person, and realising that my defining moment, my moment of most happiness and absolute clarity, was when I was with Hools.
So after a gentle prompt, some shoved chairs and two of the girls starting to cry before I even got a chance to finish my speech…. (and Hools completely unaware of what was going on), I got down on one knee and said…
Julia, will you marry me?
…..
And that was that.
(We’re off to get married in Fiji next year kids, very small group and a weeks holiday away dashed in with a wedding somewhere there in the middle. Promise i’ll write a post about it when I return….. well, maybe….!)
Adam
Adam uncategorized rants, sex and love, wedding
), saw the PlayStation sitting on the floor and said to his father “I think I’ll take that”. He replied, “After the way he has treated you, he doesn’t deserve it” and he helped me pack it into the box which was still sitting in the corner of the room.