That Time We Eloped.

I know marriage is old-fashioned and wildly unnecessary, but there’s just something about legally promising Paul that I’m going to try to be nice to him forever that made me feel joyous. There are loads of reasons that people still choose to marry. Mostly it’s just the done thing, isn’t it? For us it was a mutual affirmation of our love, a heightened sense of security, and we just really fucking like each other.

I knew I never wanted a wedding, and neither did Paul. So that was pretty easy. Being the centre of attention while spending thousands to eat a meal I could do better just wasn’t our idea of a good time. We wanted it to do it quietly, just us, somewhere that felt special and unique. And what’s more unique that getting married in Vegas? LOOOOL.

Paul was 50 in 2023. He loves anything to do with space/UFOs/aliens and I love holidays so I (pretty selfishly) decided to organise a trip as a birthday gift from me. I spent a while researching and planning (I’ll do another post about it) and booked everything and presented him with an itinerary on his birthday, it was all very wholesome. It wasn’t until after he’d got the gift and we were talking about all the things we were going to do that we realised we were going to be in Las Vegas on the 10th anniversary of our first date. It just seemed a bit like it was meant to be. I swear to God I didn’t plan it.

I googled “unique places to get married in Vegas” and Google pretty much laughed at me. Not such a thing exists, babes. We loved the kitsch drive-thru place, the neon museum was really cool, the Stratosphere have a couple of options when you’re miles in the sky which seemed cool. Then I read a blog post about lesser-known touristy spots in and around Vegas and was met with the glorious sight of Seven Magic Mountains.

“Internationally renowned Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone’s Seven Magic Mountains is a large-scale site-specific public art installation located near Jean Dry Lake and Interstate 15, approximately ten miles south of Las Vegas, Nevada. Comprised of seven towers of colourful, stacked boulders standing more than thirty feet high, Seven Magic Mountains is situated within the Ivanpah Valley adjacent to Sheep Mountain and the McCullough, Bird Spring, and Goodsprings ranges of mountains. A creative expression of human presence in the desert, Seven Magic Mountains punctuates the Mojave with a poetic burst of form and colour.”

Basically, it’s colourful rocks piled up one each other in the desert. In-keeping with Paul’s likes, it looked almost otherworldly. And I loved the idea of getting married there.

I struggle to put into words how easy organising this wedding was. It was an absolute piece of piss.

The first thing I wanted to check was whether or not we’d have to do any paperwork to make anything legal in the UK. And the answer was no! Marriage in Nevada is legal everywhere. We applied for our marriage licence online, they gave us a code which we’d need to take the Marriage License Bureau in Vegas to get the paperwork. We wanted a photographer because we wanted decent photos and not just selfies, and we’d need someone to marry us. An officiant. Back to Google!

Peachy Keen Unions had been mentioned on an elopement article I had read, so I made enquiries and found out a quick elopement ceremony with them filing the paperwork for us was $350. Sold! We were paired with Berlynn who was the sweetest woman I have ever met. She was more excited than Paul and I on the day. We had some emails back and forth about what sort of ceremony we wanted. Neither Paul or I wanted it to be too wordy, we’ve already said what we need and want to say to each other. Berlynn wrote a beautiful ceremony script. It was so funny and full of love, Paul even managed to get a joke in about how much we like sandwiches.

Photography is a completely ungoverned career choice. Anyone can pick up a camera and call themselves a photographer. Instagram is a festival of facetuned images blurred to an oblivion, all I knew was that I wanted the photos to actually look like us. I took myself to Pinterest to search for Seven Magic Mountains elopements as I wanted someone whose photos weren’t shit, already knew the place and was local. The first click took me to Amber Garrett Photography whose photographs were beautiful. We exchanged emails and had a zoom call to go through what sort of pics we wanted and what the plan was for the day, and then Amber sent us over prices. $1,000 for an elopement shoot. SOLD! The usual wedding packages start at $2,000ish and go up to ten times that, but we only wanted an hour and had already decided with Berlynn that we were going to be kicking off at sunrise.

Everything was coming up Millhouse!

We booked Peachy Keen Unions, we’d applied for the marriage licence, and we’d booked Amber. I bought a dress online, Paul had his kilt. We were sorted!

We arrived in Vegas on the 28th of May after almost a week of being in the US, we drove over from Albuquerque with a few stops on the way. We were sliiiiightly gubbed from the holiday so far so wanted to have a chilled out day on the 29th, apart from 1 task: picking up the marriage licence. We took our reference from the application we’d done online, paid the fee (think it was $115), had to do an oath promising we weren’t bampots (we obviously laughed during) then they gave us a very cute sticker.

Wednesday the 31st of May 2023 was the day! We were meeting Berlynn and Amber at Seven Magic Mountains car park at 5am. We got up about 3:30am, tried to order room service but the hotel was a shambles (don’t stay at the Cosmopolitan, it’s shockingly bad), I threw a face on and organised my hair and Paul kilted up. We drove down, got married, got some photos taken then went to a gas station for coffee! It was pretty bloody perfect.

Neither of us can really remember much about the ceremony, it seemed to pass in an instant. We remember it was very giggly, heaved forbid we take anything seriously. The whole thing was just so easy, and felt so personal and “us”. I loved every bit of it. Nobody knew we were getting married, it was just something we wanted to do for us. We FaceTimed my parents afterwards who were suitably shocked but so happy for us.

Being married is no different to being engaged so far. It’ll be handy for the other one when one of us dies. Romantic, aaaaye. Like most couples, we have been through some absolute garbage. But I can honestly say Paul’s my best friend and favourite person in the whole world, and i’m so excited about spending the rest of my life feeding him up and trying to make him laugh.