Italian Engagement

Engagement stories | Canadians engaged in Italy | Calgary wedding photographers | Fly Free Photos

Who doesn't love a good adventure story right? Well, here's one that is near and dear to my heart. Imagine this.. You are backpacking Italy for a month & you end up getting engaged along the way! haha Which came as a complete surprise!

Let me dive in a bit more, cause it truly was one of my favorite adventures! We had spent half a year planning a month long trip to Italy. We were going to try and backpack as much of the country as we could in the month there. It was honestly a toss up between jumping up to Switzerland for a week or spending the full 4 weeks in Italy seeing as much as we could, needless to say Italy won.

Through a lot of research and a wonderful app called " Visit a City " we had planned out the perfect route to take based on our flights. We were all set to fly into Rome at that's where our adventures began. I will dive into the whole trip in a later blog post more based on travel with some awesome photos but for now, I'll keep this more focused.

While planning our trip there was one place that I really wanted to go, that everyone told me not to and that is wasn't worth the time. So naturally, it got put on the list! haha Anything that has a lake and mountains is a win in my books, so Lake Garda here we come!!

Ritz will be the first to admit he had no clue where exactly he wanted to do it, however had an idea and thought about doing it a Juliet's Balcony in Verona! Personally, I am glad he went with his gut and didn't.. On our way to Verona from Cinque Terre we decided to make a quick stop at Lake Garda, originally we were just going to head there there after our day in Verona however we had got to town earlier than planned, so decided to head over to watch sunset over the lake.

If you know me, you know I'm a huge lover of Sunsets and this one was hands down one of the most amazing, if not the most amazing Sunset I have ever seen! I loved it so much that I asked Ritz if we could take a silhouette picture of the two of us with the sunset in the background, naturally he said yes!! Classic Ritz had a trick up his sleeve, he had a different plan for that moment. Given the nature of silhouette photos you cannot just face forward if you want an awesome photo, you want to make sure you can see your jaw line, so you want to slightly turn in.

So here I am telling him how we need to sit, blah blah blah, as he's back there fiddling around with something and putting the ND filter on & setting up the timer. Finally he came to sit down, I reached for his hand to hold in mine, we were all set up for a beautiful photo with a stunning sunset.

Needless to say, I couldn't have been more wrong.. Here I am looking back trying to check on if the camera had taken the photo or not, I can typically hear when the shutter goes off, and he said we was pressing the button, nope still nothing haha. In all honest, I was getting frustrated, how hard is it to press to button on the trigger so we could take a few photos before we lost the sun. So, I asked him to hand me the remote and that I would do it...

As I go to reach for the remote.. to my surprise it wasn't a remote at all! It was the most beautiful travel engagement ring, which to this day I'm still over the moon about! Needless to say, we didn't end up taking a "photo" as sneaky Ritz was taking a video the whole time. I was so very confused and surprised thinking I was grabbing the trigger haha I will be the first to admit, he did an amazing job of keeping it from me. Usually I figure things out but I had no idea about the custom ring he had made up, which honestly fit my style so perfectly. To where he hid it the whole time... He knew he had to put it somewhere I wouldn't naturally go looking for something and when you are a backpacking with only two backpacks and a camera bag that doesn't leave very many spots! haha He ended up hiding it in the ND filter container cause he knew I would have no business using the filter and he was right haha He was slightly worried it was going to get dinged at one of the many airports we went through, but thankfully he made it unnoticed and me non the wiser haha

It truly was the most amazing sunset I have ever watched with the perfect cherry on top! Needless to say, this beaut below hangs above our bed as a massive 1/1 canvas print!

Hope you enjoyed a short and sweet version of our amazing engagement story!!

Xo Shuhyta & Ritz