A: because they cantaloupe!
speaking of eloping…
mike and i were in las vegas over the weekend playing in a volleyball tournament. and you know how you notice things more after it becomes relevant to you? like, after you buy a car, you notice that same model vehicle everywhere on the road. and when you pick tile for your house, you start noticing the color, pattern, shape, and size of the tile in everyone else’s houses. well, while mike and i were in vegas, we saw wedding chapels EVERYWHERE we turned. around every corner, another chapel. right there in our hotel, a wedding chapel. and over the cha-ching of the slot machines, wedding bells rang out to us.
i asked mike dozens of times if he would marry me RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW. it would be so easy. the only requirement for marriage in clark county is that the couple is a man and a woman who are unrelated and at least 18 years old. no blood tests, and NO WAITING PERIOD. marriage licenses are only $55.
lucky for us, our volleyball team consisted of some our of closest friends and family. among them were cheryl (my MOH), john (mike’s friend from high school), greg (good friend to both mike and me), and mike (my cousin). so, what does that have to do with anything? well, in addition to being a winning volleyball team, they were also an instant wedding party!
everyone was so excited for us — except for greg. he was bitter because he has already purchased his airline tickets to kona and they are non-refundable. cousin mike suggested a drive-thru wedding, and cheryl really wanted to see us be married by elvis, but we weren’t having any of that. i mean, yeah it was vegas, but we still wanted to have a respectable ceremony!
it took a great deal of convincing, but after an entire weekend of pestering, mike finally gave in and agreed to a vegas wedding!!! so, mike and i were married on april 29th at the beautiful bellagio wedding chapel. it was an intimate ceremony, and we celebrated with a buffet dinner at the bellagio! we wish you all could have been there, but we just couldn’t wait another day to be married!!!
now, i know you are all waiting for me to tell you that this is all a joke. but i really did pester mike all weekend about getting married. cousin mike really did suggest a drive-thru wedding. we really did have an intimate dinner at the bellagio buffet. everything that i’ve written here is true — except for the above paragraph! okay, okay, you are right. we aren’t really married.
mom, you can start breathing again (if you’ve even continued reading this far).
if you believed — even for a second — that mike and i really got married in vegas, you don’t know mike at all. i totally wanted to do it. i begged and i pleaded, but as many times as i asked him, mike never even pretended to consider it. he didn’t even joke about calling my bluff — he must have known that i really would have gone through with it.
it’s not that i didn’t want to have our beach wedding in kona with our family and friends in attendance. we would definitely have followed through on those plans. but how cool would it have been to have our own little secret? when september 22nd rolled around, we’d still stand in the sand and say our “i do”s, but we’d snicker to ourselves knowing that we already did =P