27th May 2019 saw Dan and I celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary. However, perhaps even more significantly, 2019 marks our tipping point. We have known each other for half of our life times this year, and so from here on in we have spent more time together than apart. That feels pretty special.

Of course, when we met in the hall ways if Richard Huish College in Taunton in the autumn of 2003, I could never have known the adventure awaiting us. Dan was shy, quiet, a little lazy when it came to his studies, and immensely kind. I knew just how special he was when I vaguely commented one day that I was looking for a CD rack (this being a time where I still owned actual physical CDs…). A few weeks later Dan arrived at my house for a BBQ battered and bruised, with a ripped jean, before it was fashionable, bloody knees, clutching an oversized CD rack. Turns out he had cycled with the CD rack and on route had fallen off in very dramatic fashion. What a doll!

Skip forward 16 years and we have spent three of our four years married living in Japan, having the best time of our lives. It isn’t always easy living in a box, without privacy, but I couldn’t imagine a kinder and more genuine person to be on this adventure with! To celebrate this mile stone, we took at trip to Mount Fuji to visit the spot Dan proposed to me five years earlier. It seems that Japan has not respected the significance of that stone bench in Kawaguchi, with that spectacular view of Fuji san in the background. It is now a building site…still, perhaps we were the last couple to get engaged on that spot, as five years prior, as we left a digger was arriving…

The sun shined on our weekend, we broke in our new hiking boots, and took in more of the spectacular scenery of Mount Fuji. She really is a beaut. We revisited the restaurant we ate at immediately after getting engaged, and I’m pretty sure I ate the same menu item, pumpkin stew. We also added a few extras to the tip, like a little more cycling, an incredible fruit and ice cream dessert I won’t forget in a hurry, and staying in a beautiful traditional B&B  with a view of Fuji san. It was a glorious weekend, full of big smiles and very happy memories.

Here’s to the next 60 years if living life as well as this!