John drove all night and I slept like a baby. John says in California just before we got to Reno, while I was sleeping, he thought a police officer was following us. He thought our parents must have called and they must have been on to us. So John pulled into someone’s driveway and turned off his lights and leaned over till the police passed. That woke me up so we watched the sunrise as we arrived to Reno in the wee hours of the morning. We pulled into a Denny’s and had breakfast to figure out our plan. John said he figured our parents and or the police thought we would be in Reno so we decided to go on to Las Vegas. When we arrived to Las Vegas we called the courthouse to find out what the requirements were to get married. Of course this was before cell phones, so we had to use a phone booth. Well we found out really fast that you had to be 21 years old without parents consent and 16 years old with parents consent. Which we had neither. So that wasn’t gonna work. We had to figure out what to do next.

John said he had an Aunt that lived in New Mexico, so we decided to head there. John was working at one of the local mills back home and the mill had closed for a week, so we had a few days to decide what to do. On the way to New Mexico we stopped at a little Indian trading post in Arizona, because we didn’t have any wedding rings, and if we could figure out how to get married we needed some rings. The rings were $1.29 each. They were silver bands with a bit of design on them. They were a matching pair. As we got back on the highway towards  New Mexico……..all of a sudden a police officer was behind us with his red lights flashing………… (to be continued)