Austin describes the proposal: “I had to get it right because I had made her wait 5 years for it and she was so patient. I wanted to make it special, but she really doesn’t like being the center of attention so I couldn’t do anything in a big group of people. Every year for our anniversary, we do an escape room. We have done one every year since anniversary number one, but we had to miss the one in 2020 because everything shut down eight days before our anniversary. There is an escape room in the mall I work at and I had started to befriend the manager there, so one day last year, I brought it up to him to see if he could incorporate a proposal into a room, to which he told me he definitely could.

“Something to know about me is that I procrastinate everything, not necessarily on purpose, but I just get busy and forget to do things. So it was around February when I started to make plans with Max (the manager), figuring out what room would be best for a proposal, etc. I wanted to do it for our anniversary because she wouldn’t see it coming and I wanted it to be a surprise. Even though I had been looking at rings online, I waited to actually go ring shopping until it was almost too late. I went in the the jewelry store one night and the cool thing is that I got to design the whole ring and there isn’t another out there that is exactly the same. Neither Katy or I are huge fans of diamond rings so I walked in there knowing that I wanted a solitaire ruby ring, and was able to build the perfect one, but there was only one problem: I had almost waited too long to go in, as the ring wouldn’t be done until 2 days before the proposal was supposed to happen, leaving no time for delays. Thankfully, they were able to finish on time, and I was able to drop the ring off to Max the following day so that he could get everything ready for the escape room that Thursday. Knowing that we had to get to the end of the room, Max and I agreed that if we got stuck on anything for too long he would just nudge us along a little to make sure we got to the final few steps (I didn’t want to know how anything in the room worked, because I had to solve it for myself).

“We were getting closer and closer to the end, and at one point I could see the ring box with the black light (a ring box is part of the room itself, so it worked seamlessly). Once I knew we were on the clue that would get us into the box where the ring box was hiding I had to get there first. I was able to completely surprise her and solve the room, all at the same time. It was everything I hoped it would be, and I’m pretty sure it was for Katy as well.”