Rosie de Queljoe and Harrison Herzog had barely started dating when his mother took Ms. de Queljoe, in 2012, to a place in the Finger Lakes region of New York and told her that she should consider it as place for her wedding.
“‘Even if you don’t marry my son,’” said Michaleen Herzog, who is a florist in Ithaca, N.Y. “I said it jokingly, and because they were young.”
Years later, she was right.
“I was so taken aback that she was already thinking about marriage,” said Ms. De Queljoe, now 27. “But that’s the place where we were supposed to get married!”
The coronavirus pandemic derailed the couple’s plans, which included a ceremony with 200 guests at the Inns of Aurora in Aurora, N.Y. Instead, on July 11, the two were married at the Old Adobe Mission in Scottsdale, Ariz., where the bride grew up, with the groom’s older brother, the Rev. Edmund M. Herzog, a Roman Catholic priest, leading the ceremony. .
The couple met in 2011 at the University of Arizona in Tucson. They lived on the same hall in a dormitory in their first year. Both had arrived on campus early, she because she was rushing a sorority and he because he was an out-of-state student.
When he arrived, Ms. de Queljoe and her roommates came to help him move in. She made an instant impression. “She was a beautiful and smart and bubbly girl who was obviously very social,” Mr. Herzog said.
Their roommates were dating, so they spent quite a bit of time all hanging out together in that first year, and by the spring semester, Ms. de Queljoe and Mr. Herzog were also feeling romantically inclined.
For their first date, he asked her out for lunch, and she ended up paying. They went on a canyon hike at Slide Rock State Park in Sedona, Ariz., with their friends who were dating. They had a first kiss that neither recalls vividly.
But when she asked him if he’d be her date at her sister’s wedding, he declined. Instead, he suggested she visit him in Ithaca, where he would be spending the summer with his family.
So on the week of the Fourth of July holiday, she arrived in upstate New York. The two swam in Cayuga Lake and took in a Dave Matthews Band show. And, of course, Mrs. Herzog put Ms. de Queljoe in mind of the future by bringing her to the place that she would one day hope to be married.
“I really considered Harrison my boyfriend after the trip,” said Ms. de Queljoe, who is now a senior account executive for public relations in the Los Angeles office of Porter Novelli, a communications consultancy. “I met his family, I met his friends, and just seeing where he grew up and who he really was and getting to know his roots better made me assured that he was really a great guy.”
After they graduated, he moved to Los Angeles to work at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, where he is now an opto-mechanical engineer. (One of his projects was working on optical instrumentation for the Mars 2020 Rover, which has a planned launch for July 30.) He is also studying online for a master’s degree in systems engineering at Arizona.
Ms. de Queljoe joined him there about a year later and the two found their relationship maturing.
When the couple told Mrs. Herzog that they had decided to heed her advice and plan their wedding in Aurora, she was thrilled to be putting her professional skills to work for her middle son’s marriage.
Instead she did the flowers for the event in Scottsdale. There were just a dozen people in attendance at the ceremony.
“It’s definitely a family event,” Mrs. Herzog said.
And next year, the couple is aiming to have another ceremony at the place she originally recommended: the Inns of Aurora.
