Hitched.

Chris and Katie London
JULY 6, 2003

When Katie Sisson picked up her new boyfriend, Chris London, at the airport at the end of May in '02, she told him the news about her future: She was moving.

It wasn't that far. The then-27-year-old was moving in four months to Olympia--only a two-hour drive from Portland--to pursue a teaching career.

Katie applied for the job just before she met Chris that April. It only took one May weekend for her to nab it: Katie was called for an interview on a Friday and said yes to the job offer the very next day. She wanted to tell Chris, but he'd gone away that weekend.

She didn't know how long this relationship would last. It had only begun less than two months before, and why spoil a good thing, right?

But there was perhaps another, more serious, reason for her reluctance to tell Chris: Katie never thought she'd get married--ever.

Her parents were starting to get concerned, and her father would occasionally drop hints about wanting to help her find a husband. "He'd say things like: 'You should find someone. We won't be around forever,'" Katie remembers.

Katie wasn't exactly thinking about marriage when she met up with Chris--a flooring salesman who was then 25--in a Bellingham, Wash., bar. They discovered they both lived in the Portland area, and she thought he was cute. She offered to show him around town. For Katie, meeting Chris felt like a refreshing change. "It had been a long time since I'd met anyone nice or normal," she says.

In the first month and a half, she'd gotten hints that Chris was truly interested in her: a birthday present, a worried phone call when she was sick, long hiking trips in the Gorge.

Katie's premonitions were right. Chris was interested. But when he stepped off the plane to find Katie waiting with news of her eventual departure, he wasn't happy.

"Initially, I was upset," he says, noting that they shared a quiet car ride home that night. "She also didn't think I'd call her after that."

But he did call, and the couple continued to see each other throughout the summer. Chris says they grew extremely close through their shared love of the outdoors. They spent a lot of time together on backpacking and kayaking trips. Come August, Chris helped Katie with the move to her new place in Olympia.

They'd see each other every few weeks, which "made for a long school year," Katie says. But Katie also had a change of heart that year. She was involved in a friend's wedding, and that experience changed her perspective. Maybe marriage would be OK after all, she started thinking.

Towards the end of the '01-'02 school year, she wrestled with the idea of moving back to Portland, but she wasn't sure about Chris. Did he want a long-term relationship? She couldn't tell, especially since he'd recently started acting evasive. He didn't call as much, and he was acting funny. "I thought maybe I should rethink moving down," she says.

What she didn't know was that Chris was secretly planning an engagement.

He'd bought the ring sometime in June. He says he wasn't avoiding Katie but instead was trying to find a good time to catch her off guard. He found a window of time after the school year was over, and before she'd made a decision about moving.

Chris popped the question on another of their backpacking trips, this time in the Olympic Mountains over the Fourth of July weekend. Though Chris says Katie's initial reaction was nervous laughter, she said yes to his proposal.

At that point, the decision was made. Katie moved back to Portland immediately, found a job and started planning the wedding she never thought she'd have.

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