Picnic proposal

Rain, 40 mph winds and drenched sleeping bags were not Social Science teacher David Hartford’s ideal conditions for his first big date with his fiancé Christina Dobbins, but he resolved to make the most of it as they set up camp for the night. One side of their tent was open to a view of sea lions bobbing in the waves below, and although Hartford was worried his sleeping bag might slide off the cliff edge, he found himself having a good time.

After dating Dobbins for about a month, Hartford, a backpacking enthusiast, invited her on a 50-mile coastline hike on the Lost Coast Trail in North California. Despite remembering sand pelting his face like “a million pins and needles” and Dobbins almost getting knocked over by a gust of wind on the first day, Hartford concludes that “[the hike] went really well and she absolutely loved it.”

“That trip, in particular, built our love for hiking together,” Hartford said. “We’ve gone on multiple hikes there, so I decided that I was going to take her on a hike and we’ll do a picnic type deal and I’ll just propose to her out there.”

After two years of dating, Hartford carried out his proposal plan in the summer of 2019 under the guise of organizing another trip. He filled Dobbins’ Amazon account’s history with picnic supplies, asked her uncle to recommend visiting Lake Tahoe over a phone call and feigned cluelessness when Dobbins reported his own ideas back to him as suggestions for the trip. He says the plan “could not have worked more perfectly.” 

“I was terrified,” Hartford said. “Half of the things that I planned on saying just as soon as I started talking just disappeared. I was a nervous wreck.” 

Hartford and Dobbins’ wedding is currently planned for June 15. It comes after a string of three reschedulings due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the sharp rise of cases due to the Delta variant and wildfires at Lake Tahoe, where they planned to get married. Because of this, Hartford says that he and Dobbins have started betting on what natural disaster will impede their latest wedding plan and jokes that “the San Andreas Fault is going to swallow California” next.

“Being able to talk through a lot of those things goes a really long way,” Hartford said. “If we know anything for sure, we’ve survived wedding planning, [so] COVID has definitely solidified that [we can get along].”