#RealTravel: I Met My Fiance on Study Abroad in Spain

Eventually, our travels and time together had to come to an end in Milan, Italy. Dan was heading back to the states and I was continuing to travel with a friend from college. We said our goodbyes and didn’t know when we would see each other again. It was really sad because the whole situation was uncertain. We lived in different places, and I knew it would take a while before we could be a couple in the way my gut told me we would someday be. We did our best to keep in touch, even visiting each other during our senior year of college. 

In the gardens of Versailles, 2006. (Photo: Jacque Schneider)

After I graduated in 2007, I moved to New York to do Teach For America.  Dan took a year off to travel some more and save up money before starting law school.  He visited me in New York that February to visit law schools. However, he has now admitted that the only reason he was looking at schools on the East Coast was to be close to me. Dan has always been adamant that he didn’t want to be in a long-distance relationship.

The stars aligned and he ended up getting into Georgetown in D.C., which is a five-hour bus ride from New York. We made our relationship official on Columbus Day weekend in 2008, and have been together ever since. Dan spent his summers working in New York to be close to me, and we each made a trip to visit the other once a month (so we could see one another twice a month in total.). Over those three years, we took far more bus rides than we would have liked, but we also got the unique chance to spend time together in other cities. Also, with Dan being in law school, it was probably best for his grades that we weren’t in the same city.

The couple ride a camel in the Sahara Desert in Morocco. (Photo: Jacque Schneider)

Dan moved to New York in May 2011, and we literally couldn’t get our head around the fact that we would finally be in the same city. He proposed to me on the Fourth of July in 2013, and we are getting married in New York on Oct. 11^th, 2014 (Columbus Day weekend, six years after we officially got together).

We got to fall in love traveling the world together: Spain, France, Italy, Morocco, Portugal. We fell in love with traveling and love to travel together — our next adventure is taking our honeymoon in Southeast Asia!

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