Meghan Markle and Prince Harry squeezed in a special evening ahead of the Duchess of Sussex’s appearance at the SXSW conference on Friday.
On Thursday night, the couple went out to dinner at Soho House in Austin, Texas. Meghan, 42, and Harry, 39, traveled from their home in Montecito, California, to Austin, where the duchess will participate in a keynote panel to open International Women’s Day.
Meghan and Harry dined at a corner table in the private members’ club. “They were happy and in great spirits,” an onlooker told PEOPLE. “Harry was very lively throughout dinner. They were very quiet and seemed happy to be surrounded by upbeat vibes in a lively place.”
Soho House is a very special place for the couple – they had their first date at SoHo House in London in July 2016.
“Red-cheeked, puffy, sweaty, half an hour late, I ran into the restaurant, into a quiet room, and found her sitting in a small space on a low velvet sofa in front of a low table,” Harry recalled in his memoirs. Spare.
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry on February 14 in Whistler, British Columbia.
Andrew Chin/Getty
“She was wearing a black sweater, jeans, heels. I didn’t know anything about clothes, but I knew she was chic. Then again, she could make anything look chic,” Harry wrote. “I’ve seen so many photos of her from fashion shoots and TV, all glam and shiny, but here she was, in the flesh, unadorned, unfiltered… and even more beautiful. Beautiful to the point of a heart attack. I’ve been trying to process this, struggling I had to figure out what was going on with my circulatory and nervous systems, and as a result my brain couldn’t handle any more information. Conversation, courtesies, the Queen’s English, everything became a challenge.”
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Later that evening, Meghan FaceTimed Harry and they arranged a second date, agreeing to meet again at Soho House the following evening.
On Friday, Meghan will join a panel titled “Breaking Barriers, Shaping Narratives: How Women Lead On and Off Screen” alongside Katie Couric, Brooke Shields and Nancy Wang Yuen. The discussion will be moderated by Errin Haines, host of The Amendment podcast and editor-in-chief of The 19th News.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex also recently traveled to Canada, where they spent several days marking the one-year countdown to next year’s Invictus Games in Whistler and Vancouver.
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Source: HIS Education