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Well, it's Saturday night, and in the morning, we're jumping onto our cruise ship. It's been a very long three days, so get ready for a long post.

One of the things I didn't mention on Wednesday was the fact that we had been having some problems with The Wedding Chapel here in Galveston. In the past few months, we've had an extremely difficult time getting a hold of them, including when I noticed they had the wrong day on our invoice. So we swung by right after we checked into our hotel, and no one was there. We called and left 2 messages. Noon on Thursday came with another visit and more calls with no answer. Tanis and I finally decided to talk with a Justice of the Peace about performing the ceremony, because it sure seemed like we were getting screwed. It wasn't until we called the Wedding Chapel and told them we were no longer interested in their services and wanted our money back that they called us back - and even then, the call wasn't for us! They called several times trying to reach a "Candice Summer" about her wedding coming up on Saturday. Screw the Wedding Chapel, go shotgun wedding!

So, on Friday morning at 11:00 Central time, Tanis and I stood before a very nice judge (who took pictures as she performed the ceremony!) There was an "I do" and another "I do," some random promises about love and what-not, and then Tanis was officially a member of my family.

At this point, you would think the Friday fun would be over, but it's not - far from it. Tanis and I came back to the hotel to change into cooler clothes (it's HOT and HUMID here!) and went to The Strand (shopping strip) and had fun at all of the tourist gift shops. Believe it or not, the only thing we bought was wine! I managed to find myself a set of handcuffs and chain Tanis up (after telling her to get used to it).

After a long, hot day of walking in and out of stores, Tanis and I came back to the hotel. As we were getting out of the car, a school bus with lots of students on some sort of class trip unloaded and raced into the hotel. We figured that we'd head down to the pool to try and cool off from our long day, and figured that we should do it before all of the kids decided to go down.
"Now wait!" you say to yourself, "Where is everyone?" Well, see, here's the thing. Me, being the good samaritan I am, got in and saved everyone from finding the broken glass in the pool. Unfortunately, this involved a piece of glass in the bottom of my foot, and a fair amount of blood on my hand and the ground. It isn't bad at all (I've been walking on it all today), but they still had to close the pool and clean it out - turns out someone broke a clear beer bottle in there. The pool was closed the rest of the night, keeping the hotel nice and quiet (the hotel next door let everyone use their pool).

Today was another good day. After sleeping in, Tanis and I got up and had lunch at Whataburger. It wasn't too bad - just another burger chain. They had good fries, though. Then we drove down to the harbor and visited The Elissa, a tall ship built in 1877. It was a very good self-guided tour, and Tanis got lots of "Look, Jared's pretending he's a sailor by doing _____," at which point she commanded me to pose for a photo. (I had no choice - I've got to do what the wife says). Those will be on my Flickr account at some point soon.

Then we went over to the Offshore Energy Center museum on the Ocean Star, which is a offshore oil rig that was brought into the harbor and converted into a tourist attraction. It was a very cool place (both literally, god bless air conditioning, and figuratively). Tanis and I learned all about how offshore rigs drill for oil, and we even got to see a 15 minute educational film about it! It was another self-guided tour (our favorites), and we got to walk around on the rig some.

Well, seeing as how it's now Sunday morning, I'm going to get to bed - we've got a big day coming up!