Jennea and Andreas are one amazing adventurous couple! The first thing they told me is that they love to backpack and that they love to camp under the stars. I am pretty sure they are the couple I want to be someday with my hubby. I hope you love Jennea and Andreas engagement session!

“We kept it hush hush for the first part of our relationship, but we met on a dating app. Both of us had loosely explored online dating and it’s funny how quickly into the process we were when we met each other. We took our time with our relationship but discussed our long-term intentions on the second date. We sat on the cold sandy beach of Salmon Creek, wrapped in blankets as we discussed what each of us was looking for in a partner, a sort of “character investigation” as we like to call it.

He brought me wildflowers he handpicked for at least the first ten dates we had. It was sweet. We talked about our lives and realized we had many similarities, as well as surprises… I’m from a small town not many know the name of, and during my senior year of high school he moved from Southern CA to not only the same town, but just a quarter mile down the road from my childhood home. His running route took him by my house, running daily in front of the place I was raised, not knowing that his future wife was behind that picket fence. When I graduated high school, I moved to Costa Rica for a year to work on my fluency in Spanish. When he was little, he lived in the same province of Costa Rica that I had lived in, only 20 years before.

Falling in love was a journey. We came from different worlds and our conversations lead us to learn and understand where each of us was from. Andreas pushes me to step out into the unknown to succeed on my own while providing the safety net of him to fall back on. When he encouraged me to go on a grand European trip I was hesitant to go on, he made sure I booked my flight. Even when I got pneumonia and bronchitis simultaneously on that trip, he and I had international phone calls as he translated cough syrup labels from Dutch/German/Italian as I sat criss-cross in foreign pharmacies. Even from overseas, he still took care of me.

I came back from my trip with the assumption I would probably marry him one day. We went long distance a month after I got back, with him in LA and me in NorCal. This last year has been full of state-long road trips, delayed flights, and pixelated facetime calls. And through all of the effort, it’s taken to keep our relationship strong, we’ve never wavered on if it was worth it. There have been times when it’s been hard, and one of us has to carry the other one through the trials that come with being long distance, but we’ve both said that the distance actually made us closer. Out of sight and out of mind have never been true for us, out of sight and close to heart is much more accurate. For as difficult as long distance can be, it made it clear that our relationship was worth fighting for. I’m still in shock that I landed a guy like him, and I can’t wait for our kids to have his eyes” – Jennea