An Introduction

Hi there! 👋😊 For those who do not know us, we are Allison and Shawn Doyle.

The two of us at Avalanche Lake in Montana in 2018

We met at Cub Foods (a grocery store) back in 2005 where I was a cashier and Shawn was in maintenance. I remember the first time I saw him he was walking in through the sliding glass doors on a sunny day with his skateboard in his hand (he lived nearby so he skateboarded to work a lot) casually walking in to start his shift for the day and I just remember thinking "Oooo, that is a nice looking guy!" 😍 And the first time Shawn saw me I was quickly walking into work to get to the punch clock asap so I wasn't late 😂 But he told me later when we started dating that the first time he saw me he thought something like "Oh wow, she's beautiful!" or something like that. A few weeks past and during one of the times that we ended up taking our lunch break at the same time Shawn got up the nerve to say hi to me and we started chatting. Then a few times after that when I would go grocery shopping after work and he was still there he would pop his head out from the end of an aisle and do or say something goofy and it would make me laugh 😄 And then shortly down the road I ended up giving him my phone number (and MySpace user name because that's how old we are! 😂) and then we set up plans to go on our first date! So on August 11th 2005 we met up at a pool hall in Maple Grove, MN and played a bunch of rounds of pool while chatting and laughing and getting to know each other. It was a great evening and the start of a wonderful relationship together for years to come! 😊

These are the first pictures we took together while hanging out on our 2nd or 3rd date 😊❤️

Every year on our dating anniversary we would go to Valley Fair (an amusement park in Minnesota) and go on a ton of rides together and then at the end of the night we would stop at one of the booths around the park to get a caricature done of the two of us :)

Here are all of the ones we had done:

(from left to right - 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006)

The caricature from 2007 was a special one because he ended up proposing to me that day at Valley Fair on the corkscrew rollercoaster! 😍🎉💍🎢

I also think it's worth mentioning Shawn's planning ahead for this proposal. Since he knew he was going to be proposing on a rollercoaster while it was in motion he decided to tie a string around the box and then around his wrist and he also tied string around the wedding ring incase it fell out of the box! So smart! 😄

Then in March of 2009 Shawn decided to join the Army. We hadn't gotten married yet so we ended up having 2 weeks to plan a wedding and get married before he left for boot camp!😮

We were searching on the internet one night brainstorming ideas of where we could get married locally in such a short amount of time. We must have ended up seeing the Chapel of Love venue located inside of the Mall of America on some search results of possible places to get married at and we clicked on their website and as luck/fate/destiny would have it they just so happened to be throwing a celebration for it being their 15 year anniversary being in business at the Mall of America and it included marrying 15 couples on the Pepsi Orange Streak roller coaster at the theme park inside of Mall of America on April 15th! Since Shawn proposed on a rollercoaster we definitely felt that this was meant to be so we applied to be one of the 15 couples and shortly after sending the email we got a response back that said they had 2 more spots left and we were going to be one of them!! 🥳

The next day we typed up an event post on Facebook about it and sent out the invites. It was funny because it happened to be April 1st when we did this so a ton of people thought that we were playing an April Fools prank on everyone and we had to keep reassuring people "No, this isn't a joke, it's really happening!" And then a couple weeks later on the morning of April 15th we went down to the Mall of America and met up with the friends and family that came to watch us get married (along with the other 14 couple's friends and family 😂)

Shawn and I sitting in the roller coaster waiting to start saying our vows to each other:

Shawn and I outside of the entrance to Mall of America after getting married there early that day:

Here are all of the couples kissing after saying our vows all at the same time to each other! 😊

And here we are riding the rollercoaster celebrating after we said our wedding vows! 🥳

Here we are getting interviewed by WCCO. The event ended up becoming a news story all across North America and the story was featured on 35 websites total on websites like: 9NEWS Colorado, City Pages, Kare11, MSN Video, MSNBC Florida, MSNBC North Dakota, Pioneer Press, Star Tribune and WCCO

And here are a couple of the screenshots of the news stories we found:

Here is a photo of Shawn and I outside of the entrance to Mall of America after getting married there early that day:

And here is a then and now comparison photo of us the day we got married and then us 10 years later inside the Mall of America at the Chapel of Love store posing like we did the day we got married while we were celebrating our 10th year of being married in 2019 😄💖

After our wedding we went on a weekend getaway honeymoon up north and then a week or so later Shawn went off to boot camp and then off to AIT to get his training as a Satellite Communications Systems Operator-Maintainer. In December of 2009 he graduated from AIT and flew home to pack up our vehicles and then we headed down to Fort Hood, Texas where he ended up getting stationed.

He was deployed to Iraq in 2011 and he was promoted to Sergeant while he was over there as well.

Here is a picture of him and his platoon when they first arrived in Iraq:

Here is a picture of us the day he left for Iraq:

And here is a picture the day he got home from Iraq:

It was a very emotional day for both of us and it was so incredibly great to have him back home again!! 💕

We also made a lot of new friends and had some awesome adventures while we were living down in Texas for those 3 years. And we adopted our super awesome, adorable kitty Izzy in May of 2010 while we were living down there too! 😍🐈

Since we moved back to Minnesota in 2013 we've just been going on a bunch of adventures and experiencing life! And that's where this blog comes in... 😉