All the time I've spent in these forums and I've never noticed this area! I've been dying to share our plans with somebody, but I just can't, well here I can.
Sssshhh, don't tell anybody. We're eloping at Christmas.
Our problem is our families. We're both in our 40s, never married, with retired parents. Our options for marrying were grim:
1. either we marry in one country or the other and upset one family or the other; or
2. we get married in an entirely different place and take our parents with us, what a great honeymoon that would be!
We don't want all the fuss and faffing that comes with a wedding, we just want to slink off while nobody is watching and have a romantic little ceremony which is all about us and not about anybody else.
So... This is what we're doing...
We regularly visit each other anyway, so my trip to Louisiana for Christmas, which has been planned and booked for ages, is no surprise to anybody. We often take off on a little road trip, whether in the US or in the UK, so it'll be no surprise to anybody when we say that we're going touring for a few days.
I'm flying out to Louisiana on 23rd Dec, which gives me a day spare for jetlag / volcanos / other random delays. Hubby-to-be tells me that we need to go Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve
so a little delay might be no bad thing, lol.
We're spending Christmas day with his folks, then on Boxing Day we're heading out on a two day drive to Tennessee, where we have a minister and a photographer already booked, primed and ready to marry us by the side of a beautiful river in the Smoky Mountains.
We should arrive in Tennessee on the night of the 27th, which gives us the 28th to get our marriage licence sorted and buy a couple of wedding rings. We're being married at 2.45 on 29th December.
Hotels are booked, various contingency plans for extreme weather are readied.
We're staying in the Smokies for the New Years Eve party, then the next day we're going to tour a few of the neighbouring states, depending on how quickly hubby can get an appointment for his biometrics in New Orleans.
Ideally, we'll be heading back through one of the Virginias, both Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Mississippi into New Orleans on the 4th Jan - where if it all goes perfectly, he'll be biometric'd on 5th Jan. Then it's back to Louisiana to face the music with his folks, then England to face mine.
Everybody will be delighted (or relieved that we've finally settled down), but importantly everybody will be equally disappointed not to have been invited. As long as we don't break the Golden Rule of making sure nobody else knows before our parents, we'll be okay.
None of our friends know, none of our colleagues know, so keep it under your hat!
To make up to the families for the lack of wedding celebrations, we're planning on taking all of the Louisiana people out for dinner (food speaks to Cajuns), and when hubby lands in the UK a little while down the road, we'll have a welcome party for him with my family (alcohol speaks to Scousers).
Getting the visa paperwork together in secret, and worrying about things like what to say when I'm going through immigration, has kept my head so busy I've not really had space to fret about the wedding itself.
In years to come our wedding anniversary will be right in the middle of Christmas and New Year, a perfect time for going back hiking in the Smokies to where we were wedded.
Fingers crossed xx
