THE beautiful tropical butterflies and rainforest at the Australian Butterfly Sanctuary near Cairns provided a wonderful setting for a marriage proposal.

Australian Butterfly Sanctuary general manager Anja Bakker writes:

"When Steve Hawkes initially rang us and told us he wanted to be in our butterfly flight aviary when he proposed marriage to his girlfriend Lisa, we all thought this was a lovely idea.

"But Steve had a special request – he wanted the pair of them to be made a fuss of as they walked in (of course without Lisa realising this was the lead up to a proposal), and could we think of anything?

"On giving it a bit of thought, a plan was hatched.

"The Australian Butterfly Sanctuary would pretend that they were our one millionth paying customer, hand Lisa some flowers and usher them inside.

Then staff at ABS decided to get more creative; they knew of a place that supplied photographs of parts of the wings of various butterflies that spelled out all the individual letters of the alphabet.

You could put all these photos together to spell the words “Will you marry me?”.

This idea was put to Steve, and yes, he thought it was a great idea if, as part of the 1,000,000th customer prize, Steve was handed an envelope with instructions to open this inside the butterfly aviary.

Of course he would hand the envelope to Lisa to open.

Wednesday, June 24 arrived as a truly spectacular day – bright sunshine, and it was already 24 degrees at 10.30am when Lisa & Steve arrived at the butterfly sanctuary.

Staff were lurking, flowers in hand (Steve had sent a photo so we’d know what he looked like and what time they would arrive).   

Before handing them the flowers and the envelope we asked them two questions, were they planning to visit the butterfly sanctuary and what were their names (to be absolutely certain that we were handing the envelope to the right people!).

When they said Steve and Lisa, we all congratulated them on being our 1,000,000th customer, took photos and told them to enjoy their visit.

Thirty minutes later a beaming Lisa and Steve came out of the butterfly aviary.

It took this long because Lisa was so entranced with all the butterflies flying around her Steve had trouble getting her off to one side in order to give her the envelope and place the ring on her finger when she inevitably said “YES”.

More:

• Cairns weddings
• Cairns wildlife attractions
• Cairns rainforest
• Cairns wildlife in pictures

   

 

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