Wednesday    Las Vegas to Cambria California

Another swim started the day; early is the best time at hotel pools, before the pool is surrounded by people, lying in the sun in swimsuits, who shouldn't under any circumstances put on a swimsuit. If these people were on a beach then Greenpeace would try to roll them back into the ocean.

I headed out of Las Vegas on Interstate 15 until a couple of hours later when I got to Barstow where I turned onto California highway 58 which runs across the southern edge of Death Valley. When I got to Bakersfield (which I had assumed would be a small town but is actually a city of 350,000) I turned north on 99 until I got to the Paso Robles Highway which would take me west almost the rest of the way to the Pacific Coast.  I was driving through the Central Valley which is a vast irrigated food producing area; and not only food, I saw vast fields of flowers.

The temperature had been in the high 30s all the way from Las Vegas but when I got near Paso Robles it dropped from 35C to 15C within 10 minutes as the influence of the ocean made itself felt.

I arrived in Cambria just as the sun was setting into the ocean; a rare sight for someone living in Sydney. Tonight I’m staying at the Little Sur Inn which is across the road from the ocean; I can hear the waves on the beach as I type this.

Tuesday    Las Vegas

The Wedding

The wedding of Jessica and Faiz was scheduled to start at 6pm in the Bridal Salon at the Wynn Hotel. I filled in the morning floating around the pool under the watchful eye of the lifeguard. I’m not sure that the lifeguard would actually jump in the pool if a swimmer was in trouble because (a) they are too well dressed to jump into water and (b) beside each raised lifeguard seat there was a pole about 5m long with a big hook at the end; maybe that is just for pulling out the lifeless body! I took my non-waterproof camera into the pool (very carefully).

Later in the afternoon I went up to the suite that Jess and Faiz had been given as part of the wedding at the Wynn Hotel package. I took photos of Jess and her bridesmaids (Meredith, Sam and Ursula).

Jess was fashionably late to the ceremony, even though she only had to catch a lift down to ground level from her suite on the 57^th floor; there was a last minute hair adjustment required.

The celebrant seemed to have a Jimmy Stewart sort of charm without actually saying or doing very much at all to give me that impression; which i suppose is what charm is all about.

A prerequisite for the ceremony is a marriage licence. On Monday night about 10pm I had driven Jess and Faiz to the county marriage licence office so they could collect their licence. We had a bit of fun finding this office as neither of them had remembered to bring the address with them. We eventually found the office and collected the licence so that they could become one of the 200 to 500 couples that get married in Las Vegas every day. The fact that the marriage licence office is open 8am to midnight every day of the year shows how important the planned or impromptu wedding is the economy of Las Vegas.

As Jess arrived escorted by her father Richard I felt the need to wipe a tear from my eye; she looked so beautiful. The ceremony was the best kind, short and to the point. I think the taking of the photographs afterwards took much longer than the ceremony. Further photos were taken in/under the extraordinary flower display near the entrance to the hotel.

The reception was in a private room at the Lakeside restaurant at the hotel; things got off to a very good start with Bollinger flowing freely before we sat down to a yummy dinner (I had the non-vegan options). The speeches were heartfelt and brief; although Richard’s was much shorter than he had intended as Jess had done a bit of censoring of his original speech and he told me he was too frightened to, as I suggested to him, simply reinstate the original words once he got up and started speaking!