Earlier this week, we at the Tribune posted a call-out to local couples, asking them to tell us their romantic stories ahead of Valentine’s Day.
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We quickly got a response from Yass local David De Jong.
David, who used to live in Israel as a firefighter, was due to return to Australia in July 2009.
However, he had a change of heart before his trip, and decided that he would stay in Israel and join the army instead.
On the same day that David was supposed to leave, his future wife, Melissa, flew into Israel from San Diego in order to pursue her goal of teaching English.
Eerily enough, the pair even lived at the same address, “just in different buildings”, according to David.
The first time that the two met, Melissa was sitting on a bench near their residence.
David, who could not afford a car, was riding his pushbike home when he saw her.
He decided to strike up a conversation with the pretty girl sitting on the bench, and as fate would have it she “loved my uniform and that I was a firefighter,” David said.
“As soon as we met, I was a confident man.”
David couldn’t wait to see more of her, so he asked Melissa if she wanted to meet him that same night for a rather unique first date.
“I thought first date tonight, [we could] go for a jog and then go to this beautiful park with swans and roses,” David said.
The date went well, David said, and he summed up the evening with the two words that every first date wants to be associated with: “We kissed.”
From there, things moved quickly for the new couple.
They moved in together two weeks after their first date, before eventually moving back to Australia.
They became engaged after having dated for a year, and David found employment with the Ambulance Service of NSW.
The next few years of their lives were dominated by David’s work duties as he was posted around the country, before finally landing at the Yass station and, as he says, “the rest is history.”
