25 Years Ago Today...

...in an almost-empty mall in Redding, CA, Ann Reed (Shasta County Clerk) presiding:

Jami:  I barely remember doing this.  All I CAN remember is that I didn't shower that morning (we had camped the night before and the showers/toilets were completely unacceptable) and so we thought we'd be clever by swimming in the dying lake outside Shasta, CA.  The water level was (at least) 10' lower than it should have been (dry summer, dry winter, dry everything) and we had to wade through deep rotten sludge to get to the lake.  The lake was warm and slimy, and then we had to wade back out through the sludge to get back to our site.  And, so, hot, sweaty, slimy, sludgy and covered in bug bites, we made our way to the county clerk's office.  When I announced that we were there to get married, the two women working there clearly thought we were insane.  "Oh, no," I insisted, "We really are here to get married."  Some farting around that I don't remember, a lot of signing stuff I don't remember, and these pics (which I also don't remember standing for) and it was done.
Simon: our original plan was to get married in a hollowed-out Sequoia log many miles to the Southwest.  We'd seen this chapel by the roadside (presumably the Pacific Coast Highway - or Highway 1) on previous camping trips and thought it would be a suitably romantic/ridiculous wedding venue.  However, when we arrived, we learned that its proprietor was on a month-long vacation, and that the nearest place to get married was Redding, about 50 miles inland.  And "inland" in Northern California, means across the mountains away from the cool, green coast and into Death Valley Desert conditions.  So we were pretty grumpy.  Redding was hit by the massive fires of last year, and I wonder if all record of our nuptuals went up in smoke.