Travis and I were both serving missions for the LDS church in Santiago, Chile. With around 270 missionaries and only 60 sisters, we never met or served in the same districts or zones during the 18 months that we were actually serving together (although we realized later that had it not been for Transfers we would've been in the same zone twice!) Travis claims he had seen me at some big conferences and assumed I was from latin america and knew no english (hahaha). And well, the first time I ever heard mention of his name was when one of his trainees, Elder Sorensen, knew I'd be going home the same transfer as him and asked me to give him a message. Our last week in Chile the group of missionaries who were going home had a small lesson in a chapel next to the Santiago Chile temple before doing a session together. It was there that I saw, then, Elder Roberts sitting in one of the rows of church benches and approached him to pass on his trainees message. Travis actually remembers nothing of this encounter, but technically this was the first time we met. It was here in the Santiago temple that we took our first pictures together. It's funny to see we were on opposite ends in all these pictures and seriously never spoke to each other the rest of that day while at the temple.
Our next encounter was at the airport the day we were to fly home. We were again in several group pictures together, and in the line to go through security, a group of us were all chatting about where we'd be going home to. I guess it was here that Travis heard me speak English and realized I was not going home to Central America, hahaha! But because I was on a direct flight to Miami, I was on a separate plane than everyone else and I remember waving goodbye as all the missionaries headed left to their gates and I went right. We both probably thought that was the end of that and that we'd never cross paths again, at least I did. Little did I know...you see...that day when we all went home and I was going trigger happy with my camera, Travis made an infamous appearance in one of my photos aka the photo bomb! It was this innocent act of fun that got this whole ball rolling! Had it not been for this picture I would've never cared enough to add him on FB to tag him and we never would've started talking and end up going on our date marathon and falling in love months later! See how quickly things can escalate through social media?! I never understood what an important tool it was for dating until then!
So as the story goes, once home in FL we began talking through FB, then texting, and then I came up to Utah for school and we went on our first date, or what I like to call "Date Marathon" because it was an all day event together. Being that Travis was from West Valley he wanted to take advantage of being down in Provo and do a lot of things, so I (bolded for emphasis) planned our first date, I guess it was that missionary instinct to plan, but also Travis had never been in Provo before and wasn't too familiar with what there was to do here, so I didn't mind. I was super nervous to be spending an entire day with someone I'd only been texting. I had been going on a lot of dates, most of which, after an hour of dinner, would bore me and I'd be ready to go home. I thought, this is either gonna be awesome or a disaster! But after a day of visiting museums on campus, lunch at Sammie's, an embarrassing swim in the pool (that's a story for another day), and watching Prestige on opposite ends of the couch (like the awkward RM's that we were) we really connected and it wasn't a disaster at all! I gave myself a rule, once I came home from my mission, that I'd never go on a second date unless I was reallyyy interested in someone, and Travis was that someone :) Our courtship flew by so quick and after 3 short months of dating, we absolutely knew, through a lot of prayer and patience (mostly on his part), that we needed to be together...
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