Marriage

Marriage. We can't even really remember if I asked her, if she asked me or if we just KNEW we would be together forever someday. We think about it now, and even with the regret of not having that memory, the feeling that we knew we would marry is more overwhelming than anything in life!

Penny is from Minneapolis, Minnesota. I am from Dallas, Texas. Neither of our families nor our friends would be able to travel to the other place for a wedding. What a dilemma! What did we do? We decided to leave them all out, run to Las Vegas and get married!

A week or so later we took off from DFW Airport bound for Las Vegas. We stayed in Excalibur, the medieval castle there on the south end of the strip. They were just building Luxor at the time.

We rented a car, and drove, and drove and drove. There are billions of places to get married in Las Vegas. We could have done it there at Excalibur. We could have done it at any of the little chapels. While we were deciding, we went to get the marriage certificate. Did you know you can get married in Las Vegas *24 hours a day*! I think the license department may even be open 365 days of the year too!

After that, we drove more. We pulled in to the Little White Chapel on the strip. This is the place where Michael Jordan and Joan Collins were married -- but not to each other. Drive-Thru weddings. I could just see it now: We pull up and there is a window, much like at the burger places, and a female Elvis impersonator asks us if we want fries with our service...

Rather than start out on the wrong foot and trivialize marriage, we decided to be a little more conventional and went back to the Justice of the Peace. What an education in CORRUPTION! As we were sitting there, waiting on him to fill out the certificate, he noticed that Penny was reading a sign on the wall that said basically not to tip the JP. He noticed, and made sure to tell her that although he could not ACCEPT a tip, that didn't mean we could not LEAVE one.

So, the service took a whole +/- 7 minutes. He signed the certificate with a felt tipped pen (Crayola Marker??) and I, not wanting the origional torn up and us not registered, left a $35 tip on the desk, as that was all the money I had!

With the formalities done, we got in the car and headed down the road, just driving. We stopped at a 7-11 to call our parents. We got back in the car, started driving, and ended up a Hoover Dam! So that's what we did. We spent the next couple of hours at Hoover Dam!

Later that might we had a nice dinner out then enjoyed the first legal night of marriage together. The next day we gambled a little, went to see a show, and then came home the following day.