14th Feb – Wedding Day

The Wedding Day

The great day! What a tale! It was fun and I got to marry the best woman in the world!

The start wasn’t so much fun though. Jet lag and/or being 8 hours ahead meant that, despite the long, long day before, we woke at about 4:00am and decided to go downstairs for an early breakfast in one of the Aladdin Casino’s 24 hour buffets. When we got back upstairs Lynne had loads of time to get ready and we were all ready shining like a new pin by the time the Limo was due to collect us at 9’o’clock. But it didn’t, we had to make several calls to The Little White Chapel before a non-limo finally collected us.

Which meant that we’d missed our appointed 10’o’clock wedding slot (the last one of the morning which is why I had booked it in the first place), and were informed that we would just have to join the line. Lynne ‘sweetly’ informed them that “in the UK a line is called a queue, and queue rhymes with sue, and that’s just what we’d do” if they didn’t get it sorted. So they took us outside to take the ‘after the wedding’ shots for the album we’d also booked.

We then got to ride back to the hotel in the Limo which they’d finally found. There we had our Wedding Reception. Me and Lynne consuming two bottles of Californian ‘Champagne’. It was very nice and dirt cheap and did the job. Thank you to the Table Manager who took our photo after the Croupier politely declined my request stating it would break the State Gambling Laws to touch my camera.

Our Wedding Reception

13th Feb – The Flight Out

Garrath’s bit

This was my first ever ‘long-haul’ flight, and I think Lynne’s too. We really had no idea what we were in for at all. First there was checking in. We had to get to the check-in for around 8:00am for a 10:00am take off. Usual chartered flight chaos, compounded by the huge number of passengers a 777 can carry.

The flight, ‘uphill’ against the Jetstream, took over 12 hours, so we landed at around 10:00pm body-clock time but it was only about 3:00pm local time. 12 hours is a long time to be cooped up, and that huge plane shrank as the journey went on. Still the in-flight entertainment was impressive with a widget in the seat arm that pulled out on a cable. One side was a games console and controller for the on-demand videos and audio. The other side was a phone! Lynne was tempted to use it but the cost was just plain silly.

Lynne’s Bit

My wedding hat caused a reorganisation in passenger luggage. I had carefully lodged it in a locker when a stewardess came with more luggage to jam into the locker. I exclaimed,

“You can’t do that, I’m getting married tomorrow and this is my wedding hat!” I explained to the stewardess and she took up the cause by announcing “Ladies and gentlemen, if you have something in this locker can you please move it. This lady is getting married in Las vegas tomorrow and we have to make sure that her wedding hat gets there undamaged.” Fellow passengers were duly compliant, gave us their congratulations and moved their stuff then the stewardess found some soft packing to ensure that my hat made the transatlantic trip completely unharmed. This was the first of many happy memories of the trip.