Green Taxi

Katie and I arrived in Lahaina, Maui, on New Year’s Eve Day.  We had an early flight out of LA, gained 2 hours flying, and thus were exhausted by midnight.  We celebrated New Years Eve at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co after a fun dinner of Peel-n-Eat shrimp and listened to a solo guitarist rock out some Tom Petty and other covers.

Thus, New Years Day started out after a well rested night and we awoke to a warm sun on our bed.  We were both excited to get going, so we packed up our towels and sunscreen and headed to the beach at our hotel, the Sheraton Maui.  We spent the morning snorkeling at Black Rock where I tested out my new underwater digital camera and got great shots of Katie chasing a fish.  If you listen carefully to the video, you can hear whales in the background…they were definitely not far off shore for most of our stay.  We watched them jumping off our front porch that afternoon.

We ate lunch at the poolside grill and spent most of the day reading and relaxing by the ocean.  We went in the water several times and had sunshine on us all day long.  The day was exactly what we had been looking forward to for the past two months.  Sun, water, and relaxation.

Eventually, we wandered back to the room.  I showered up while Katie took a short nap and then I had a seat out on the deck to read.  Earlier, around mid-afternoon, I could tell that this was shaping up to be the perfect day to propose, so I had asked Katie if we could watch the sunset outside that evening.  She was happy to, but by the time she got in the shower, we were closing in on sunset time, so I began to get a bit anxious and thought we might miss it.  I stuck my head in the shower two or three times to see how it was going and update her on how close we were getting to sunset.

Let me step back to the morning.  One thing all proposals must work around is the secret transportation of the ring.  Flying to Hawaii with a ring in my carry-on was nerve-wracking enough, but I almost blew it when we were unpacking.  Katie had unpacked all of her stuff that morning and was very proud with how well she had organized everything.

“Do you want me to unpack your bags and organize your stuff too?” Katie offered.

“Sure thing,” I said, delighted.  Then panic set it.  The ring was in the bottom of my bag still.  It was in a separate pocket, but there was a good chance she would run into it.

“Actually, don’t worry about it,” I tried to change my mind nonchalantly.

“Really?  I love organizing.  I want to clean up this mess you made on the floor”.

“No, it’s fine.  I’d prefer to keep the stuff where I know it is for now.  I’ll sort it out later.”  I managed to save the surprise, but she was disappointed.

Back to Katie’s shower.  At this point, I snuck into my bag, got the ring and slipped it into my shorts pocket.  I was scared to death it was going to fall out of my pocket or through a hole in the pocket, so I must have stuck my hand in there to check on it every 30 seconds or so for the next 30 minutes.

Eventually Katie got out of the shower and I encouraged her to quickly throw something on so that we could watch the end of the sunset.  She came walking out to the deck with a towel on her head and bare feet, slightly annoyed about the rush.  I had to ask her to go back in and take the towel off and throw some sandals on so that we could walk outside a bit.  She came back out, definitely annoyed to be leaving the room with wet hair and no makeup, but happy to see the sunset, and we walked up to the hedge in front of our room.

I navigated us to the clearing in the hedge where we could see down to the secluded Black Rock beach.  We were looking at the sunset and I made a comment about how cool the beach looked.

“We should go down there,” Katie suggested.  Perfectly according to my plan…as if it was her idea!  We hopped the fence quickly and navigated down the rocks to the beach.  After a minute or so, I sat down on a rock and she eventually came over to me.  There wasn’t any room nearby to sit, so I had her sit on my lap.  We enjoyed a beautiful moment on the beach listening to the small waves lap on the soft sand and the fading pink go from the sky.  It was an extremely relaxing moment and I will never forget it.  Katie commented how I was really being sweet to her today and she kissed my cheek.

After a few minutes, I realized that it was going to be difficult to propose while she was on my lap, so I pointed to a crab on a rock several feet away.  Katie loves any and all animals so she jumped up and ran over to it and started looking around for more.  I continued to sit there, watch and laugh as she had fun in the tide pools.  Eventually, she came back over to me and at that point I stood up.  My hand went into my pocket to grab the ring.

At this point, let me tell you a little about the ring.  I initially started the ring shopping with my mom, which I knew she would love and it really made the engagement planning special.  We spent an afternoon looking at diamonds online and looking at the type of ring that Katie had pointed out to me.  After that initial research, I spoke to a few other diamond sources of mine and looked at several diamonds.  I must say that I now know a ridiculous amount about diamonds and online diamond shopping.  Bluenile.com is the place to go for diamond ring shopping, and while they have the largest selection, they do not have the entire supply of diamonds on the market.  My advice for diamond shoppers is that once you should figure out exactly what you want on Bluenile, then check out other places and speak to jewelers about what is available.  If you are looking for a standard diamond, you can probably find one you want on Bluenile, but the more exotic or different the diamond, the more you will need to look around.

(Side business note:  If anyone ever wants to do the diamond business correctly, this business model should work flawlessly to dominate the market:

1. Purchase the diamond.com or diamonds.com domain.
2. Purchase the search and filter software that Bluenile has created to narrow down choices.
3. Add the 6x, 12x, 14x, and 28x loop magnification photos of your actual diamond to the site in the same way that JamesAllen.com does.  This way you can see the individual flaws on each diamond.
4. Add a search engine to the software that searches as many diamond dealer sites as possible in the same way that PriceScope.com does. 

The combination of these sites will dominate the diamond business.  Google would have the ability to do this best and so would Bluenile.  Hopefully someday someone will build this and men’s diamond search woes will be cut in half.)

I ended up purchasing my diamond from my jeweler.  I found the jeweler, Joe at Yale Jewelers, after a few stops in Santa Monica and realized that he knew exactly what I wanted and would work with me to make it happen.  I showed him what I was looking for and a few diamonds that I was able to find, but in the end he found one that worked best with what we were creating.  I ended up building a 3+ carat, VVS2 clarity, H color, Radiant cut diamond.  Joe was able to find two 0.75 carat trillion shaped diamonds with the same color that fit perfectly size-wise next to the radiant.  It lined up fantastically on a thin (2.0 mm) platinum ring.  I am very glad to have gone to Joe to build the ring rather than going off of Bluenile because I got the exact match of color among all three diamonds (we looked at a lot that did not match) and the ring was built to perfectly fit each diamond rather than being fitted into a stamped out factory ring.  I would recommend Joe to any ring builder out there.

Back on the beach, I found the ring in my pocket and I asked Katie if she loved me.

“No,” she joked coyly.

“Well, that’s too bad, because I love you.  And I will love you forever and I want to marry you.”

At this point I got down on my knee and proposed.  She was in complete shock and said yes after the few seconds of Oh-My-God wore off.  We hugged and kissed and I told her how much I loved her.  We sat there and talked for several minutes and I told her all about our future together.  I will never forget that beach.

Eventually we made it back to the room and decided to call our parents.  They were all excited for us and then Katie called or texted a couple close friends as well.  I did not contact anyone else myself.  I knew my mom would do great work spreading the news, so by the next morning, I only had to email or call one or two other close friends that had not already heard from her.  As fun as it was to tell friends, I really just wanted to enjoy the vacation and spend time with Katie on the beach.  We got to do plenty of that over the next several days, which made it great.

To cap the night off, we went out to a dinner at the Kobe Steakhouse in Lahaina and had really great filet and shrimp teppanyaki.

The night ended as we drove back to the hotel with the top down in the convertible and looked at the stars while dreaming of our great future together.

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