Missiles-- Engage!

The biggest news out of my and Cameron's trip to France was that we got to see Victor Hugo's house, whose portrait is pictured here:

Also, we happened to get engaged.  Here's a blurry picture of the ring:

Cameron has probably written extensively, and betterly, about it on her blog, found here, but I thought I would add my side of the story, a few weeks later.

I had been planning to propose to her when we took vacation, since we never really got to go on vacation together last year.  And it just so happened that we decided that Frrance was the best place to vacation in April.  Scratch that, October.  It was originally April, but life got in the way, and I couldn't complain, since I didn't get around to buying a ring until August.  Thank you, mom, for the stone.  I'm sure my wallet would have committed suicide if I'd had to buy a diamond too.

My plan was to duct tape the ring to the inside of my wallet and chain that to my pants once we got through airport security, and then somehow secretly untape it and present it to her on the first full day of our trip, at Monet's Garden, on the Japanese bridge, or maybe a little off the bridge, since I was very, very scared of dropping it in the water.  I also planned to shanghai some unsuspecting tourist into filming the proposal on my phone.

The lesson I took from that first day is you don't make plans, because they will all go to pot and you'll miss the train to the place and waste $60 in unrefundable ticket fare, but it was probably for the best because it rained most of the day anyhow.  We bought tickets for the following Monday.  And I STILL had to walk around Paris with a very expensive piece of jewelry in my wallet, sending invisible signals to all the pickpockets in the area.  At one point, Cameron lost her credit card at Shakespeare and Company, which is a great store where they speak English, so I didn't mind going back there at 7 to retrieve it.

Since it was plain to me that first day that the trip was clearly destined to be a series of ever-wackier and more expensive misadventures, I decided that the sooner the ring was on Cameron's finger and out of my pocket the better.  The cafe we ate dinner in was too small to properly propose in, so I procrastinated until right before we were about to go to bed, and after thinking really hard about what the most romantic thing to say would be, softly blurted out, "marry me?"

She said yes, and made me untape the ring from my wallet and we found out I'd gotten it a size too big, but the rest of the trip was pretty good and when we finally got to Monet's garden the sun came out.  Here are some pictures.