Plan Your Vegas Wedding

By Jenna Pope

So you've just gotten engaged, and you are planning for the big day. You don't want a traditional wedding -- with all of the expense of invitations, a fancy wedding dress, photography, food, wedding djs, and the like. Big weddings are beautiful, but they can be very expensive. A good alternative to a big wedding is a Las Vegas wedding.

I was remarried three years ago, and my husband and I chose to get married in Las Vegas. In fact, we decided to elope! We had to wait for our divorces to be final, and during that time, we planned a wedding that we could leave for at a moment's notice.

First I picked out a dress. On my computer, I Googled "Seamstresses" and found one close to where I lived. She helped me to design a sleeveless sheath dress of ivory satin, covered with lace. By having the dress custom made, the finished dress fit me perfectly.

My husband, later, rented his tux from one of Las Vegas' many tuxedo rental stores. The cost was reasonable, and the service was personable.

Wedding Chapel

See all 3 photos

In researching wedding chapels, we decided on Little Church of the West. In Las Vegas -- whatever you want, you can get. You can get married at your hotel or in your car or at the top of the Stratosphere Hotel. We chose the Little Church of the West because it was small, since it would just be the two of us. We ordered a wrist bouquet for me, and a boutonniere for my husband from the chapel. The pictures, minister, and wedding video were all included.

After we arrived in Las Vegas, the day before we got married, we got our wedding license. The wedding license bureau is open until midnight. We finally got there at 10:00 p.m. and, believe it or not, we still had to wait in line to get our wedding license. In front of us in line was a couple from Italy, and in back of us was a couple from Israel, which reinforced my belief that people from all over the world come to Las Vegas to tie the knot.

On our wedding day, the first thing we did was create our wedding cake. We'd bought two birthday cakes from a market bakery, re-frosted them, decorated them with artificial flowers and a bride-and-groom cake topper that we'd brought from home. And, voila! We had a wedding cake!

Our Beautiful Wedding Cake

When we had priced wedding cakes, a single, one-layer cake delivered to our hotel was over $100.00. Our do-it-yourself, double-decker, two-layer cake was under $50.00.

We were married at 6:00 p.m. in the evening. Everything went smoothy, the flowers were beautiful, and it felt surreal that, after waiting for two years, we were finally husband and wife. After our wedding, we had dinner at one the fancy restaurants in our hotel, and while we were waiting for our reservation time, I put a quarter in a slot machine outside the restaurant and won $80.00!

The next day, we set up our video camera on its tripod, and filmed ourselves cutting our wedding cake and toasting our upcoming life together.

Husband and Wife

Our Las Vegas wedding experience was beautiful, and I would recommend Las Vegas to anyone as a wedding destination. Everything you need for your nuptials is close by, and you can plan your special day to be exactly the way your want to be with very little notice.