Escapes WEEKENDER
A step-by-step guide to getting hitched on the fly in Sin City (Elvis included) How to Elope in Las Vegas BY JACKIE BRYANT
“F
-it,” my now-husband and I said to each other in our Mini Cooper as we were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert. “Let’s get Elvis.”
enough of it to make a baby (biological clock and all that). So, we decided, let’s just get married in Vegas! Las Vegas: The Wedding Capital of the World Weddings are half the reason the city exists, if you ask the thousands of people who choose to tie the knot there yearly. More than 77,000 people got married in Clark County in 2022. I’m sure many of those are locals, obviously, considering the county’s population is just over two million people. But a look at marriages performed during the early Covid days indicates lots of these may be visitors: Just 226 marriages were performed in April 2020, compared with 6,736 in April 2022. In any case, Las Vegas has dubbed itself “The Wedding Capital of the World,” and for good reason. The wedding industry is responsible for four percent of all visitors to the city and generated $88 million in tax revenue in 2021. Clark County Commissioners even declared February 2023 “Wedding Month” in anticipation of issuing its five- millionth wedding license. As for us, we’re not exactly “Vegas people.” Neither of us like gambling, we’re both kind of allergic to crowds, and we don’t drink that much anymore. On the flip side,
Being a quick drive down the 15 from Las Vegas, San Diegans are no strangers to skipping the formalities of wedding-having and driving up the freeway to tie the knot in Sin City. Earlier this year, my now-husband and I decided to join their ranks but weren’t sure how to do it. We figured it out and wanted to spread the good word just in time for everyone to finalize their summer wedding season plans (or lack thereof). On this particular road trip, Las Vegas was the halfway stop on our way to the Utah desert, where we’d be staying at a swanky hotel for a few nights for a story I was assigned to write for San Diego Magazine ’s travel section. It was January, and we’d had the trip planned for six months already. Sometime after agreeing to the trip, I found out I was pregnant. Not married and in our late 30s but already together for more than two years, we had talked about eloping for a while but never found the time to do it. Time is a funny thing, though. We’d managed to find
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