This blog is a little more personal but I couldn’t get married in Las Vegas and not write a little something about my experience!
Finding your perfect wedding venue can be a daunting process, there are so many options to choose from and it’s easy to get overloaded when researching online. Weddings are big business all over the world and everyone wants a slice of the cake! We found the best thing for us was to think about WHY we were getting married and make our decisions based on that.
We decided to go to Las Vegas just the two of us, in a bid to see some more of the world whilst avoiding the obscene expense of getting married in the UK – we were looking at £30K for the venue we liked! We booked our flights and hotels and started preparing for our next adventure.
Choosing our Venue
Cheesy, tacky and totally OTT. Some of the words that might come to mind when you think about a Las Vegas wedding. Sure, if you want that sort of thing you can find it, but Las Vegas has some great wedding chapels that challenge all of the stereotypes surrounding ‘the Britney wedding’.
We opted for The Chapel of the Flowers on the Las Vegas strip, the venue looked beautiful and would allow us to live stream our ceremony to family and friends at home. We spent four months planning our wedding day and it couldn’t have been easier. From the moment we booked the date, our wedding planner was on hand to organise everything from the flowers and buttonholes, to photography packages and dinner recommendations.
Before we knew it, the time had come for us to fly out to Vegas and make one of life’s biggest commitments.
Our Wedding Morning
Our wedding morning started with a cold croissant and good old American coffee – not exactly a champagne breakfast but we knew we were going out for a good meal that evening. This was washed down with some well-wishes from family and friends back home. We parted ways at 9am, allowing me to have the suite to myself to primp and preen ahead of our 11.30am ceremony.
My journey down to the Valet was an interesting one, there I was standing in a lift in my wedding dress when three men and their suitcases gate-crashed my ‘pre –wedding thinking space’. Anywhere else this would be rather embarrassing and unusual but in Las Vegas anything goes, the men congratulated me and continued with their conversation as if it was quite normal to stumble across a bride in a lift!
At 5’11 I was impressed with the amount of legroom I had on the way to the chapel, taking full advantage of a limo all to myself! It’s quite something traveling alone in an unfamiliar place, your mind makes you think about the strangest of things that are absolutely nothing to do with your wedding day… what will we be having for lunch today and I wonder where I would be taken if the driver turned out to be a kidnapper? That sort of thing…
The Ceremony
My greeting at the chapel was warm and friendly, the staff were clearly used to hosting more nervous brides so were quite taken aback when I announced I didn’t feel nervous at all. Apparently the other half was, in his words, ‘bricking it’ at this point!
The ceremony itself was lovely, short and sweet which is just what we wanted – no fuss or faff. After the ceremony, we were left alone to comprehend that we were now, in fact, a married couple. This was a nice touch as sometimes with weddings they are so full on that there is no time to actually take a step back and appreciate the words that have just been said to one another. This was followed by a photo shoot with our photographer and witness, Devin, who did his best to get some romantic shots but we had already warned him that we were pretty awkward and don’t take anything too seriously!
Our morning was finished up with a limo ride back to our hotel where we spent the journey catching up with friends and family who had just watched the ceremony in the UK.
It may not be everyone’s ideal wedding day but we really enjoyed our Las Vegas wedding and wouldn’t have done it any other way. Plus, by removing the extortionate cost of a UK wedding we were able to stay in the 5-star Vdara, treat ourselves when we wanted to and finish our trip with an eight-night stay in Hawaii!
There is no right or wrong when it comes to weddings, although many people think it should be a traditional affair with bells and whistles. As long as you do what is right for you as a couple and focus on what’s important to you, then you can’t go far wrong!
