Sacramento Weddings

The night she met Adam, during a friend’s bachelorette party, Alysha admits trying to avoid him. “I wanted to make the night about my friend and not me,” she says. “Adam was persistent. Every time we would escape from him, he’d find us again.” Even after sitting in the bathroom for about 10 minutes waiting for him to lose interest and disappear, there he was when she finally emerged. They exchanged numbers. Then nothing. For six months. “One day I got a Facebook message from him asking if I wanted to go to a Giants game with him. I was dating someone at the time so politely declined,” she remembers. “Three days later the guy and I had broken up, so I wrote Adam back asking if he was still up for it, and it has been history from there.”

After getting into a car accident a few days before Valentine’s Day, Alysha and Adam decided to celebrate a day early to cheer up the mood. When they arrived at their favorite restaurant in Lodi, Pietro’s, flowers were waiting on the table. As they walked to their car after dinner, Adam stopped Alysha in front of the restaurant and hugged her, kind of oddly she recalls. “It was different. He started talking to me, but what he was saying didn’t make much sense. Then it happened…he got down on one knee and proposed.”

Alysha says she wasn’t that girl who had everything planned out since she was young. In fact, the only thing she knew she had to have were the centerpieces. “Those were my babies!” she confides. Overall, the planning went pretty smoothly, though she admits wine became one of her best friends during the process. “The person who was making our cake canceled on us less than two weeks before the wedding,” she shares. “But I have an amazing mother who graciously took care of it for us.”

Once the big day arrived, a pristine and romantic ceremony greeted them, with the couple sharing their vows with Adam’s daughters. The reception was equally memorable, with plenty of laughing, dancing and joy all around.

Before the wedding, the pair had gone to a bridal show and entered a competition where the future grooms had to get on stage and serenade their future wives by dancing to a song chosen for them. “The song they chose for us was ‘Ride It, My Pony’ by Genuine, and they had given Adam a stick horse, sat me on a chair and made him dance for me. In the spirit of us winning first place, I figured I’d surprise him at the reception by making him do it again.”

— Darren Elms