For many of you, this is where your week in Vegas begins! Please provide your flight number in your RSVP. If possible, Steve & Gemma would like to pick as many up as possible from the airport and take you to your accommodation.
Where possible, we'll try to collect you from the airport and get you safely to your accommodation.
After that, you're largely our responsibility until Friday night. We apologise in advance.
Have a light breakfast this morning.
You'll understand why later.
Our joint Sten Do begins in perhaps the most American way legally available to British people on holiday:
SHOOTING SOME FREAKING GUNS.
We're arranging transport with pickups at 11:00am to take everyone to Battlefield Vegas.
This is pay-as-you-play, and importantly, you do NOT have to shoot to come along. Spectators, nervous spouses, photographers, designated survivors and people who simply want to watch their friends discover the concept of recoil are all extremely welcome.
Never fired a real gun before?
Well, that particular hole in your education is about to be violently filled.
After Battlefield Vegas, our transport will take the whole group directly to Atomic Golf.
If you're not coming to Battlefield Vegas, that's absolutely fine — but you'll need to make your own way to Atomic Golf and be there no later than 2:00pm.
Who will be the sharpest shooter?
And, more importantly, who's going to claim they meant to miss?
Having spent the morning handling firearms, it seems only responsible that the next activity should involve unlimited alcohol and people swinging metal clubs.
What could possibly go wrong?
Meet us at Atomic Golf, where Steve & Gemma are paying for everyone to have:
Unlimited food. Unlimited drinks. Unlimited golf. For two whole hours.
Yes. Unlimited.
The order in which those three things begin affecting your golf swing is entirely up to you.
Boys in one zone, girls in another.
Afterwards, head back to your rooms, shower off whatever shame you've accumulated so far and put your gladrags on.
Because we're nowhere near finished with you yet.
We’re starting the evening Sten crawl at Las Vegas' oldest bar, Atomic Liquors. Apparently the sensible way to begin a night on Fremont is in a bar named after nuclear fallout. ☢️🍺
Meet us here, get a drink inside you and say goodbye to whatever standards of behaviour you arrived with.
From there, we’re working our way along Fremont Street, past people doing things at street level that probably shouldn’t be legal, and at least three moments where you’ll quietly ask yourself, “What the hell am I looking at?” 🎰🎶😂
We’ll stop wherever looks fun, loud, dangerous or likely to produce an anecdote nobody will believe the next morning. The plan is beautifully simple: start Atomic, stagger through Fremont, finish with a Legacy. 🍸➡️🎰➡️🥃
If you make it to the end with your dignity, your wallet and both eyebrows intact, frankly, you haven’t committed to the experience.
At some point during the evening we're going to attempt one of the most difficult manoeuvres of the entire wedding week:
transforming a group of people who've been drinking on Fremont Street into people Bruno Mars might conceivably allow into his bar.
The Pinky Ring is Bruno Mars' very swanky 1970s-themed lounge inside the Bellagio.
If you don't fancy doing the whole Downtown adventure, you can simply meet us there at 10:00pm.
Give yourself time to find it. The Bellagio is enormous, and wandering around drunk repeatedly asking strangers where Bruno Mars keeps his Pinky Ring may produce mixed results.
And there is a STRICT DRESS CODE.
Stylish upscale nightlife fashion: collared shirts, slacks, nice dark denim without holes, cocktail dresses and similar.
In other words:
Try to look like you've got money, even if Vegas has already taken most of it.
There are no organised events today.
This isn't poor planning.
It's a medically necessary recovery period.
Have a lie-in. Hydrate. Eat something beige. Lie beside a swimming pool wearing sunglasses and tell everyone you're “absolutely fine”.
If you've somehow escaped Tuesday without requiring life support, today is completely yours. Hire a car, explore Vegas, take a helicopter over the Grand Canyon or go and see something you've always wanted to see.
Speak to Steve first if you're planning an attraction — he's plugged into a pretty big network in Vegas now and may be able to get you a deal.
If you wake up somewhere unfamiliar, check your camera roll before contacting the authorities.
Right. Apparently after all that, we’re actually supposed to get married.
The ceremony starts at 2:00pm at Chapel of the Flowers, so please be there by 1:30pm PROMPT.
And one very important instruction:
DO NOT ARRIVE SOBER, SILENT AND SITTING THERE LIKE A ROW OF STIFFS. 😂
Have a couple of drinks beforehand. 🍸🥂🍺
Turn up happy.
Turn up noisy.
Turn up ready to cheer, laugh, shout, clap and generally behave like you’re at a Vegas wedding, not waiting for a dentist appointment.
We want raucous.
We want lively.
We want Elvis wondering whether he’s actually the most outrageous person in the room. 🕺
There will be vows.
There will be Elvis.
There will almost certainly be behaviour that would get us quietly removed from a traditional British wedding.
👗🕺 DRESS CODE: VEGAS — LOUD & PROUD!
This is not the day for beige.
Think colour.
Think sequins.
Think sparkle.
Think loud shirts, bold dresses, outrageous accessories and anything that makes you look like you’ve just won a casino, bought a penthouse and developed a mild cocaine problem. ✨🎰😂
If you’re wondering whether your outfit is “a bit much”…
…it probably isn’t enough.
And after six years, several countries, a global pandemic and an entirely unreasonable number of trips to Las Vegas…
WE’RE GONNA GET MAHHAAAHHHRRIED!!! 💍🎰🍾🕺
We're not leaving the chapel and politely dispersing in taxis.
Oh no.
Waiting outside will be a 45-SEATER PARTY BUS.
Loud music.
Alcohol.
Approximately forty people who have just watched Elvis marry us.
Essentially a nightclub with seatbelts.
Everyone piles aboard and we're heading down the Las Vegas Strip to the world's biggest In-N-Out.
There will be music.
There will be drinks.
There may be dancing.
There will almost certainly be at least one person who discovers that standing up on a moving bus after several drinks was an error in judgement.
This is our wedding transport.
Because apparently a normal coach wasn't sufficiently ridiculous.
Still wearing our wedding clothes, we’ll pile out of the 45-seater party bus and descend upon the world’s biggest In-N-Out on the Las Vegas Strip. 🍔
Forget silver service.
Forget seven-course tasting menus.
Forget paying somebody $180 to arrange three asparagus spears artistically beside something called a jus. 😂
We’re having Double-Doubles, Animal Style Fries and milkshakes. 🍔🍟🥤
You might want to Google the SECRET MENU beforehand — because apparently even ordering a burger in Vegas requires insider knowledge. 🤫
You haven’t had a burger until you’ve had an In-N-Out.
And if you’ve never eaten one dressed for a wedding, surrounded by roughly forty increasingly drunk people who’ve just been transported down the Strip in a mobile nightclub…
…then frankly, you still haven’t experienced it properly. 😂🍔🥤
Once everyone is fed, watered and has inevitably dripped burger sauce somewhere inappropriate, it’s back onto the party bus. 🚌🍾The music goes back up.
The drinks come back out.
And the bus takes the whole lot of us from the Strip back to our place for the wedding reception.
So our wedding afternoon is basically:
🍸 Pre-Wedding Dutch Courage → 💒 Elvis → 🚌 Booze Bus → 🍔 In-N-Out → 🥤 Shakes → 🚌 More Booze Bus → 🏠 House Party
At some point, somebody looked at this itinerary and said:
“Yes. That seems like a perfectly sensible wedding.”
Nothing says holy matrimony quite like secret-menu burgers and melted cheese.
Welcome to the wedding reception.
Vegas style.
Join us at our clubhouse for drinks, food, music and whatever fragments of respectability survived the party bus.
This is where the formal part of the wedding officially ends and the evidence-gathering phase begins.
No hotel ballroom.
No £200-a-head wedding breakfast.
No chair covers.
No distant cousin giving a 45-minute speech about something that happened in 1997.
Just our friends, our family, plenty to drink and our home city.
Ready for...
THE HANGOVER: PART 4?
Come back to ours for a very chilled pool party.
We've got the pool, cabanas, single beds and jacuzzi.
There will probably be alcohol left over from Thursday.
There will definitely be takeout available.
And there will be absolutely no judgement if you spend three hours horizontal beneath a towel reconsidering every decision you've made since arriving in Nevada.
🧺 IMPORTANT: Bring a towel from your hotel. We have many things in Vegas, but apparently 40 spare pool towels isn’t one of them. 😂 Please don’t arrive expecting Steve & Gemma to run a linen service while recovering from their own wedding. If your hotel notices half its towels have migrated to Summerlin for the afternoon… that sounds very much like a conversation between you and housekeeping. 😇
Think Vegas Strip pool party, except without the $800 cabana, $14 bottles of water and a 23-year-old DJ screaming at you to “MAKE SOME F***ING NOISE!” while you're trying not to be sick.
Relax.
Recover.
Regroup.
Because inexplicably...
there's still one more night.
If, against all reasonable medical advice, you still have functioning legs...
we're going out again.
Meet us at JEWEL Nightclub inside Aria.
Steve knows the nightclub host and is arranging tables, so we need confirmed numbers in advance.
Anyone still capable of entering a nightclub after this week has either extraordinary stamina or a serious problem.
Either way, we respect you.
And don't worry.
After tonight...
Steve & Gemma will finally let you all go home. 🙁