What Happens in Vegas

Looking back on it, I'm surprised I only visited Las Vegas twice during my time as a college student. It was only three hours from campus, an easy weekend trip. And it was easy enough to pull together a group who wanted to go. The simple truth is that there wasn't much reason to leave campus. We were allowed to drink there, so no one had fake IDs. And there's no reason to go to Las Vegas if you can't drink.

So it wasn't until Spring Break of my senior year that I finally made the trek to Las Vegas. The year, the pope had moved St Patrick's Day back, to keep it from interfering with Holy Week. Not that that stopped us from celebrating on the actual day. But it did give us a very good excuse for celebrating the entire weekend leading up to St Patrick's Day. Us and the rest of Vegas.

We piled as many people as we could gather into a few cars and stuffed ourselves into hotel rooms, using every scrap of floor to keep the hotel costs down. We got drinks at Fat Tuesday's, the cheapest way to get drunk and stay drunk all day long. We bedecked ourselves in green and spent our time wandering around the strip, taking in the sights and general chaos.

The truth is that this trip stands in my memory as a blurry series of vignettes, with no real time order. We all managed to maintain a nice buzz for the entirety of our trip. It was fun, but it doesn't make for coherent memories.

I know that my dad gave me some of my step-mother's money, for reasons I still don't understand, and I used it to win a fair amount of money at the roulette wheel, betting on my birthday.

I know that we weren't the only group of students from our college who had decided to spend St Patrick's Weekend in Las Vegas. We encountered the other groups from time to time, our numbers swelling and dwindling throughout the days and nights.

I know that we spent some time by the pool, but that's not where I got sunburned. I got sunburned during an ill-advised walk from the main strip to the northern end of the strip, when I and a few others needed a break from the ceaseless party.

I know that we tried to get our friends, who had been dating a month, drunk enough to get married and forget about it, while they tried to do the same to me and Kevin. No one got married that weekend, but we all did later.

I know that we played and won beer pong at the Irish bar, and the frat boys from other colleges were very upset to be beaten by girls.

Beyond that, I have only a a sense of contentment. Drunk and surrounded by friends, on the verge of graduation but with the real world still far enough away to be ignored. We explored the city and celebrated everything.