Our Story

Cliff and Alison's story begins in late 2014, when both of them independently began to play a game called Ingress. Ingress challenges its players (called agents) to go to places in the real world to claim "portals" and link them together in the shape of a triangle to capture the territory inside for their factions (green team or blue team). These portals can take many forms, statues, murals, churches, libraries, and historical markers are some of the more common ones. But if you want to capture territory, it can be very helpful to find portals that are a bit harder for your opponents to reach, such as portals that require hiking some distance.

The View From "Washington's Canal," a favorite portal for both Cliff and Alison

At the time, Cliff had chosen the green team, and Alison had chosen the blue team. For over a year, without ever meeting and seldom communicating with each other, Cliff and Alison found themselves as natural rivals and opposite sides of a coin. Cliff would hike out to a portal and capture territory for the green team, Alison would hike out to negate Cliff's work and capture somewhat different territory for the blue team. Out of the rivalry grew a respect for each other from afar. 

In the spring of 2016, Cliff and Alison found another thing in common - the end of their previous marriages. Unfortunate though that may be, it opened the door for them to get to know each other better. As they began communicating more they found they had a lot more in common than just a shared love for Ingress. Similar hobbies (including SCUBA diving), similar music taste (including guilty pleasure favorite Taylor Swift), the same preferred programming language (Perl), the list goes on. Their first actual date was in August 2016, seeing John Oliver perform at the Kennedy Center.

This performance was followed by their first trip, to Denver Colorado to participate (on opposite sides) at an Ingress event. This would be the first of many Ingress-motivated trips together, for events large and small, in Toronto, Honolulu, San Antonio, San Diego, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Amsterdam, Chicago, Montreal, Brooklyn, and more. Along the way, in January, 2017, Cliff made the difficult decision to switch teams so that he and Alison could play as partners, rather than rivals. 

Ingress friends walking around Haarlem, The Netherlands

The proposal: Cliff and Alison were participating in a much larger than usual Ingress operation, in which Cliff and Alison were to go to Tangier Island, Virginia - a small island in the center of the Chesapeake with very little cell phone signal reachable only by boat. Perfect for a field that would cover Washington, DC and Baltimore, spanning from West Virginia to the Chesapeake Bay up to Philadelphia. As soon as the last links were thrown and the operation was a success, Cliff got on his knee and asked Alison to marry him (spoiler alert: she said yes). 

The ring is a Montana Sapphire, in the shape of a triangle to symbolize an Ingress field, most blue, with just a little bit of green at its center. A beautiful color even without the obvious symbolism.

Cliff and Alison love to explore the world and especially spend time in nature - hiking, kayaking, biking, or as they say "doing the things." The original plan for the wedding was to have a fairly intimate ceremony some place meaningful (just prior to the pandemic they had selected this spot in San Francisco as the locale), and to follow that with a larger gathering in Northern Virginia.

This was actually going to be "the spot."

Unfortunately, Covid-19 had different plans, and Cliff and Alison had to pivot. They considered delaying the entire wedding until the threat had passed and/or doing a courthouse-only wedding, but ultimately settled on a very intimate micro-wedding at a vacation home a short drive from home. 

Fortunately, both Cliff and Alison's parents are able to join, along with Alison's sister and Cliff's son. Alison's life-long best friend will also be there and is going to officiate the wedding.

Hopefully at some point in 2021, they can have a larger gathering to truly celebrate their union. But for now, virtual gatherings are the best they can do.