Rich and Ashley Brandt: Our Story

Ok, I'm sorta copying my sister here, but I don't care cause it's cute... This is the story of Ashley and Rich Brandt (from Ashley's view):

After I graduated from high school, I went down to Southern Utah University. While I was there, I met a bunch of people including Rich. We weren't really friends or anything, but we knew of each other from common friends. As the years went by, nothing happened, and after my sophomore year, I went with three of my friends to Hawaii for the summer.

While I was there one night, I got a text at about 11:00pm (3:00am Utah

time) from a friend, and then another one, saying the exact same thing,

from Rich. I responded to Rich first

and later found out that the two were working a night shift together and got bored so they both texted me to see

who I would respond to first. After

that, we would talk occasionally and I found out that Rich was transfering up to UVU that next year. I tried to convince him to stay at SUU, but I guess we weren't good enough friends at that point yet for my opinion to really matter ;)

When I got back from Hawaii, I had to go up to Salt Lake for an exit interview with the company we had been working for. I told Rich about it,

and he said we should do something that weekend while I was up. So after the interview got over, I gave him a call and he said he had military stuff going on that night. I figured that meant he couldn't do anything, but then

he asked if I would to go with him. I was kinda confused, till he explained

that it was the military ball they do once a year and it was "kind of a big

deal so you'll need to wear a dress". Ha ha, so not really knowing what was going on, I called up a friend to ask if I could borrow a dress from her, and luckily, she was going to the same thing that night! So I got a little more information about it from her and ended up having a blast at it! There was a live band, all of the dates were in semi-formal dress and those in the

military were in their class-A's. I felt like I was in the movie Pearl Harbor or something, ha ha... just kidding. But seriously. So, that was our first date... and that's a picture of us. Just kidding, we didn't take a picture that night, but I wish we would have.

After that weekend, I went home to Lindon a lot to see my family since I was gone the whole summer, and most of the time I would end up just hanging out with Rich instead. After a few months of that, we started talking about dating and a little later got into the possibility of marriage etc. etc. Most of my friends didn't even know we were "hanging out" or anything, and my family didn't know how serious we had gotten so when I told my parents we were probably getting married, they were a little shocked. To say the least. When I first mentioned it to my parents, we had already bought a ring and everything. Basically we just did everything by ourselves without the influence or opinions of everyone else. It was kind of nice that way :)

On April 10th 2009, we went down to Manti to visit Rich's mom and

see some of his friends. While we were there, we borrowed a neighbors horse and went up into the hills behind Rich's house and he proposed!