...well, sort of.

Despite attending the same (very) small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania - you know the type: the place where everyone is super friendly and if you aren't friends with everyone, you certainly know about everyone – it would take us 10 years to meet.

Joint credit for the meeting goes to Elizabethtown College and my wing-girl January. Let’s go back to 2019; it’s Jon’s 10th reunion. I am attending as a member of the Etown College Alumni Council. My role is clear – serve as a greeter and host for the Class of 2009 reunion. And if you know me, you know that isn’t a role that I am eager to fill. So, to help get through the day, I asked (forced?) Autumn and Ryan to attend homecoming.

As soon as they arrived, I took January, their daughter, and told them to have fun since watching J ensured I had something to do instead of actually talking to anyone. Most people respected that boundary, but Jon isn’t most people.

Andrea and January, Etown Homecoming 2019

Let’s talk about Jon for a minute. He is, in many ways, my exact opposite. He is outgoing, jovial, and loves to chit chat. And chit chat he did. ALL. DAY. LONG. It didn’t seem to matter where we went – Bowers Center, bookstore, Steinman Center – there he was chitchatting. And I am sure you are thinking, “But Andrea, your friends had your back, right?”. Absolutely not. Autumn and Ryan were far too encouraging of his behavior and definitely didn’t have my back (or so I thought at the time).

As homecoming 2019 drew to an end, I made an out of character move and connected with Jon online. And so, our friendship began…

As 2019 turned into 2020, Jon and I talked off and on as he worked on his MBA in New Jersey and I made job moves in Baltimore. I don’t think either one of us really thought anything of it since our lives were taking us in different directions. And maybe nothing would have come of it until that fateful month in early 2020…

In March 2020, I went home and Jon moved back in with his parents to weather the pandemic. Text messages became phone calls which morphed into video calls. There wasn’t much else to do so we talked about everything – work, life, travel plans, Jon’s final MBA classes, future plans, anything to take our minds off the chaos outside. It was during those calls that Jon met Poppy.

As the world started to reopen, our talks turned from the future to the present. Since most places were only open under COVID accommodations and restrictions, we made the most of the outdoors and started exploring the hiking trails in Pennsylvania and Maryland. Jim Thorpe and the D&L Trail quickly became our go-to spot. We would start with a picnic, hike for a couple of hours, and end the day with to-go drinks from a small distillery near the trail. Rain or shine. Summer to winter. We hiked miles and miles and talked for hours.

Behind the scenes photo from the first JLew Travels YouTube video in Shenandoah National Park and our first photo together!

It was during a hike in Shenandoah National Park that things shifted. Jon had graduated from his MBA program the previous winter and was ready for something new after being at his job for over a decade. He was starting to look for new jobs, but it didn’t sound like he was excited about the prospects. I asked him what he would do if he could pick anything. Travel, he said. So, I mentioned some YouTube travel channels that I followed that might be interesting to him. Later that summer, Jon would decide that he wanted to jump onto the YouTube train with his own travel channel.

Jon’s new YouTube endeavor was the perfect excuse for us to hang out more and explore new places. We started an ever-growing list of places we wanted to see together. I served as camerawoman and editor and Jon as the on-screen talent. Poppy even made a few guest appearances as our travels allowed.

Conquering Acadia's Beehive Loop trail

We started small – local trips in Maryland and Pennsylvania to find a rhythm – before jumping into interstate travel and taking a road trip to Maine and Acadia National Park. It was that trip, at least according to Jon, that showed him this friendship might be more than that. Maine was just the beginning for us. With YouTube as a backdrop, we are slowly ticking off every US state, city, country, and experience on our list.

We have had a few memorable trips that stand out. Our road trip to Lake Placid started in a blizzard. We got to our mountain retreat just in time for Jon to experience some of the worst stomach flu symptoms I have ever seen. If nursing someone through a stomach flu when you are fairly isolated in the mountains and several hours from a hospital isn’t love, I don’t know what is. Yet it was months later in Philadelphia that Jon first told me that he loved me. We celebrated friends’ weddings near and far; shared COVID isolation on Mount Rainier; and, fell in love with Longwood Gardens.

Let’s fast forward to our engagement in 2023. Jon and I designed the ring together with the promise that I wouldn’t see the final ring until he proposed. Despite my best efforts in searching for the ring, I never did find it at home. (It turns out Jon knows me well enough that he gave it to his best friend in Pennsylvania to keep…) However, Jon isn’t the best at keeping secrets so when he mentioned he wasn’t bringing the ring on our trip to Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Asheville, I knew the proposal had to be set for a planned late summer trip to Longwood Gardens. But don’t worry, he still had a few surprises up his sleeve (the aforementioned ring location being one of them). Jon proposed in front of the main fountain in Longwood’s Conservatory. In addition to a group of very excited women, I was surprised to see Autumn and Ryan in what would turn out to be a fitting close to a circle that opened 4 years prior at Etown.

* If you got to this point, kudos! This was obviously written from Andrea’s perspective since Jon’s take on ‘Our Story’ was “we met at Etown, went to Maine, I told you I loved you in Philadelphia, then I moved in.”