A guide to elopement. VEGAS STYLE (viva Las Vegas part two)

Britney Spears superfans that we are, our list of things to do in Vegas includes an elopement wedding in Sin city. It turns out, getting married is quite an easy thing to do. And in a bullet point list, this is how we did it.

1. Get the marriage licence.

In Nevada, getting a licence for mawwiage is an incredibly easy task. It’s no more difficult than applying for a TV licence (Definitely not as hard as the rigmarole of getting a passport), Just line up, pay your money through an office window, wait for a few checks (the office clerk asks you if you spelt your name correctly – we both managed this on our first attempt) and voila, licence granted in no more than ten minutes. Both of our names lie next to each other on a piece of paper and we are officially qualified to get mawwied. (Weird, Really, really weird) As we walk away from the council building Lucy only very slightly starts to FREAK OUT.

To combat the mini-meltdown, we drink mimosas and eat in the swish 50s style diner at the base of the stratosphere hotel. As we sit in a red leather booth sipping from tall glasses, one of the serving waitresses grabs a microphone and breaks into the Motown Classic ‘Be my baby’. She works the floor and has a great voice.

“Lucy calm now”.

2. Get the venue/location, or where we ‘did it’

We check out venue options, which for us are incredibly not ‘us’. The choices don’t fit what we want to do (which is very little). And also we only have one guest, Glen (popping over all impromptu like from Colorado). An amazing array of awe-less options are available, all wedding-tastically-horrific and pander to the worst bits of mawwiage ceremonies. As we sit through sales assistants pitching their services, my skin begins to crawl. It seems we have entered extreme wedding land. Nothing is flexible or negotiable, everything is expensive, naff and demotivating and I feel a massive rush of empathy for people who plan big weddings (with more than one guest). We want none of it and decide we want a quick, super simple affair with some good photos to take home for the ‘rents and ‘riends.

We check out of Circus Circus leaving the haggard carpets behind and stay in the Stratosphere hotel at the end of the strip. The Strat’s USP is that it has a huge mega tall tower you can go to the top of which looks over the entire city of Vegas. This lofty location is also a possible wedding Ceremony place, but upon setting up a meeting, get put off when talking to the snobbish inflexible staff who want to charge us 300 dollars for Glen to ‘watch’. Nah.

After some research we find that there are ministers who will mawwy you wherever you like in Vegas. We find a lovely lady called Peachy Keen who agrees to mawwy us on Saturday the 30th of November. Our venue/location of choice? Why the Welcome to Las Vegas sign of course! It’s free to go there and has an iconic classic kitschy charm to it. Perfect in every detail.

3. Get the photographer

Our research goes online to find a good photographer in Vegas. After searching for a couple of days, we fire a few emails off to a number of photographers who either don’t get back to us or are scarily expensive. We chance upon the services of Steven Joseph, a local fellow who has some slick looking magazine style, super high quality photos on his website. We email him and within a day he responds to our query. We set up a meeting with his wife Chris, who we meet just outside of the South end of Vegas in a coffee shop. We get on really well with Chris who is instantly warm and entertains all of our ideas and requests. We fortuitously chance upon some broken links on his website whilst looking at some photos online. Sniffing an opportunity like a Dogshark smells blood, I pimp Lucy’s web design services in the hope we can bring the price down. This goes down well and within a couple of days we have organised a full service swap, photographs for websites. We get it all for free! (Kind of) We left the coffee shop punching the air and trying not to whoop too loud.

4. Organise the wedding dinner.

At the top of the Stratosphere hotel is a swish restaurant called The Top of the World that revolves, giving a 360 degree view of Vegas. It is perhaps one of the most expensive places to eat but is spectacular enough to warrant the price. Earlier on in the week we had been hawked to receive one hundred dollars off TOTW and all we had to do was to attend a ‘short’ presentation to receive the vouchers.

“Ok. Timeshare it is then”.

We arrive at a good quality Mayan theme resort twenty minutes to the North of the Las Vegas strip, register our names and wait to be met by a small Mexican chap called Cecil asking us questions about our income. We are ushered in to a small room with seats arranged in a congregation style format.
What follows is one of the most depressing “it’s not a timeshare” (it’s a timeshare) brainwashing presentations by a company called double diamond. The presenter is all American and delivers in a style that is one part evangelical, one part stand up comedian and eighty three parts cock end. Brimming with arrogance, he is the worst facets of mankind and when he thinks he is being funny pulls a duck face to let the audience know when to laugh. We rarely laugh and get sickened when see people falling under his spell.
He has a talent for unravelling people’s insecurities and ideals, often quoting spurious statistics that allude to a detriment of health unless they take more holidays, Aka BUY OUR TIMESHARE!

He tediously asks for amens over and over again.

“Can I get an amen?”
“AMEN” says everyone except us.

He persists and is gruelling in his rhetoric. The crowd are whipped up and ready to sign up to a lifetime of timeshare holidays (not a bad thing in itself, there are some sweet destinations in the catalogue) except for us.

We exit the presentation depleted and are then set upon by Cecil. He knows already he has a tough sell but is adamant to put us through the process. Wave after wave of offers, price cuts, and rate reductions hit us as we realise he is super keen to turn in a sale today. A short presentation becomes a three hour slog. All we can say is no. We don’t have the money. He goes away, to get a final offer from ‘his boss’. He presents a low price and we present a NO! One final guy lays the final low low fee and finally they give up. We walk away with the one hundred dollar vouchers, but by George did we work hard to earn it.

5. Organise the stag/hen do.

Organising your own stag do is great if you are in Vegas. Anything you want to partake in feels tantalisingly accessible and on this occasion, what happened in Vegas, is leaving Vegas.

Despite my pacifist leanings, there has always been something about shooting a real gun with live ammo that has appealed to me. Perhaps a residual effect of watching too many eighties action films, and wanting to grow up to be Robocop for about three years of my childhood. Glen and myself decide to try out Battlefield Vegas, a gun toting shooting gallery on the outskirts of the Vegas strip (I sense Glen is a bit reluctant, but I totally bully him into it). We get picked up from the Venetian hotel in a battle hardened humvee that has seen actual action in Iraq by a trainee doctor in full army fatigues working to fund her university education.

We arrive at the gallery and are offered a la carte or set meal style shooting options for our dollars. Any gun you have seen in any film or video game is available to shoot for a price. An actual arsenal of firearms adorn the walls with price tags reaching far into the thousands.

We take the call of duty package which includes an AK47, an UZI, an MP4 and another gun that I can’t remember the name of (a rifle style Remington?)

As we line up, we can hear the distant crack of gun fire travelling through walls in spite of layers of soundproofing doing its very best. We are briefed by an ex gulf war veteran who gives us protective goggles and ear defenders. A wave of nervousness manifests itself in giggles between Glen and myself and we are beckoned into the shooting gallery. War vet has to shout extremely loud to make himself heard over the gun fire and the effectiveness of the ear defenders.

War vet unlocks the guns from a padlocked cage and loads a clip into the gun. I start with the UZI which scarily becomes more addictive with each bullet shot. Starting with the one shot setting, the power is scary even with its relatively small size. I finally let rip as the gun sprays bullets down the shooting gallery at the paper target. The automatic spray is where the gun horrificly feels most fun. With an inner conflict raging I finally run out of bullets and hand the gun back over to War vet Shaking from the adrenaline flowing through my veins.

Glen takes his turn, fires the MP4 and winces from the power unleashed. His aim is truer, evidenced by the retrieval of the paper target. He reminds me of this constantly throughout the day.

The AK47 is relatively huge and looks instantly recognisable. War vet pushes in the clip and with a smile hands over the AK. The gun fits neatly into my shoulder, ergonomically sculpted. I pull it deep into me, look down the sights, hold my breath and tentatively pull the trigger.
The gun recoils with an insane amount of force. After the first shot my shoulder feels like it has been smashed by an angry sledgehammer on its period. I pull a face at Glen trying to convey the might of the gun in a single facial expression. It’s dually terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. Each shot compounds the shoulder pain and by the end of the clip is almost too much to take. The fury of the impact ripples through my ribcage and upper skeleton, making me really glad I’m not on the receiving end of the gun. The bullets of the AK create exciting sparks on the back wall as they collide with force. Onlookers watch as I get told exactly how it is by an automatic machine gun. The recoil bruises my shoulder for the next few days but leaves a longer lasting inner conflict. I couldn’t help but love every second of it.

The day chrysalises into night bringing the final part of our pre-mawwiage shenanigans to a near close. All three of us take a trip to the Olympic club just down the road from the Stratosphere. I’ll put my cards on the table right now and say the Olympic is a strip club, a club in which ladies take their very small clothes off and dance on poles, sometimes upside down. Music pumps loudly and girls line up to perform in the center of the club as a kind of showpiece for their goods. The girls shake their moneymakers to a surprisingly mixed gendered audience who can put money in their pants or order a private dance if they want. Lucy Glen and myself take a seat near the center to look at the near acrobatic feats of the dancers, and their jiggling boobies. One lady straddles the chrome pole, flips herself upside down and somehow manages to ascend to the top in a show of incredible strength and dexterity, head still pointing at the floor. This draws the attention of the crowd who go wild for her talents.

The next girl that appears, dances for a couple of minutes, then takes a keen interest in Lucy. She walks to the front of the stage kneels down and with her pointing finger beckons Lucy closer. Lucy complies and quickly the dancer pushes lucy’s head in-between her boobies. She then proceeds to perform what is commonly known in the business as “motorboating”. She Alternates boobie to cheek and other boobie to other cheek. Glen and myself burst into hysterics finding it hilarious. Post motorboating incident, Lucy recounts her disappointment that the performer was not more ample of bosom. Telling me:
“I would have liked a bigger pair, they were just a bit small and sweaty really”.

Glen goes to the bar to get us some Jagermeister shots and we start to notice the club filling up with dancers, a lot of dancers. At one point there seems to be an almost 2:1 ratio of dancers to customers. Dancers sprawl and perform all over the seated customers and there seems to be a surprising amount of touching going on. The dancers start to act a bit predatory, starting to approach us in small swarms. One has the audacity to pinch my bottom, even in the side by side presence of my betrothed (really the cheek of it all!).
Glen comes back from the bar with three $40 dollar Jagermeisters and a transsexual at his side. She introduces herself as ‘Mystery’ but it’s quite clear to us which gender she used to be.

In pursuit of balance we head upstairs to the male strippers so Lucy can have a look. Lucy is appalled by the performance and we head back downstairs. Chaos reigns supreme, with body parts writhing everywhere. The yard of Daquiri mixes with the Jagermeister and we make the right decision to leave.

We are after all, getting mawwied in the mornin’.