Getting Married in Las Vegas
Las Vegas is the wedding capital of the world, with thousands of couples flocking to sin city every year to tie the knot. The streets are lined with wedding chapels offering everything from an Elvis led affair to a drive through ceremony and the Las Vegas strip is full of newly weds celebrating their big day.
After getting engaged in Niagara Falls in 2021 me and Ben started planning our dream wedding, whilst we wanted the big white wedding, we weren't quite sold on paying the £765 registrar fee that the Cheshire East council were trying to charge in the UK. So we decided to hold our big white wedding in the beautiful Cheshire countryside and do the legal part of the ceremony in Viva Las Vegas!
Now we all saw that one episode of friends where Ross and Rachel get married off the cuff in a Vegas chapel after a little too much to drink, but the reality of a Vegas wedding is a little more complicated and requires just slightly more planning.
In order to get married in Las Vegas there are a few steps that needed to be completed before the actual ceremony can take place. We had to apply for a marriage license through the Clark County Clerks Office, this process was done online and required background details on both parties including passport information and parents names. This was the only thing that needed to be done before we arrived in Las Vegas...and booking our actual service of course! After browsing online through the hundreds of options we opted for the sign and go package offered by the Mon Bel Ami Wedding Chapel. This package cost $39 and was just the legal service without all the bells and whistles and included witnesses.
After arriving in Las Vegas we had to take a taxi out to the Marriage Licence Beureu to collect our marriage license and pay the fee. The marriage licence beaureu was set out like a post office with multiple windows and a queue of people waiting to be seen. The line was actually quite short on the day we attended but it looked like they had the capacity for it to be a lot longer! After waiting for 5 minutes we were called up to our window. The process of obtaining our marriage license was relatively simple and just required us to go through our application, making sure all of our details were correct. We then had to repeat a statement whilst holding our right hand in the air which felt unbelievably american and we were done! The next step was to head round the corner to our Chapel and get married!
On arrival at the Mon Bel Ami Wedding Chapel we were greeted by our minister who took us through and checked through all of our paperwork, he then guided us into the main chapel and performed a short but sweet service to join us legally in matrimony. The whole process was so easy and really intimate which is what we wanted from our legal service and really cost effective. After we returned home there was a letter in our mailbox that outlined the information for how we could send off for our official marriage license and within a few weeks it had arrived safe and sound to our address.
