On our wedding day, we each went through our pre-wedding grooming with anticipation that was surprising considering we’d been living together for 10 years by the time we got married.

Me in my new dress (which Pat helped pick out) and Pat in his new suit (which he’d failed to get tailored, so it gave him a sweet little-boy-in-Dad’s-suit look), we headed towards Mesa.

As a side note, I did not help him pick out his suit.  He thought it was hilarious to not let me see it until the last possible second.  I think he was going for a backwards-themed wedding given that we’d already reversed so many other traditions.

We gave ourselves three times as much time as we’d been told we would need to get to the courthouse.  We had to arrive by 4:50PM so there would still be witnesses there to sign the wedding license.  The judge performed ceremonies after hours.

We made great time, got to the road the courthouse was on with plenty of time to spare, and headed East.  We crossed from W University Dr to E University Dr and started watching for the courthouse.  We got to the spot where it was supposed to be; there was no building with that address.

Puzzled, we turned around and drove back the other way, thinking maybe we had the address wrong and it was really W University Dr.  We got to where the address should should have been and, again, there was no building with that number.

We called the courthouse and they told us they were, in fact, on E University Dr and provided helpful hints for someone who’s never been there like “we’re right next to the intersection where the McDonald’s used to be.”

We turned around, headed back East, and came to the same place we’d been before.  No building had magically appeared.  I called again.  They seemed completely clueless as to where we could be or how to help.  We were starting to panic.  We were running out of time.

On a whim, we decided to keep going East in case there was some weird mis-ordering of addresses or something.  As we continued to go East, E University Dr suddenly became W University Dr again.  This made our heads spin.  I pulled out my glasses to make sure I was looking at the right road on Google maps on my Blackjack (remember those?) fearful we had just gone in a circle without realizing it.  We had not.

We nearly turned around again, but I had the sudden thought that if there were two W University Drives, there must be two E University Drives, too.  So, we kept going East.  And, lo and behold, there was another E University Dr and we found our courthouse just in time.

And that is the story of how I learned West is East of East.

P.S.  Photo Credits on pictures of us go to the Judge who married us–he took pictures with my PowerShot G3 while he was marrying us.