DC VEGAS XII: Just Another One of Those Epic Sin City Weekends...

BY DC CUEVA 

■ linktr.ee/dc408dxtr

Usually, the way things work at DCBLOG is that it takes a good deal of time, effort, thought and detail to put together the many posts and the outstanding content that this site has been able to offer on here the past ten years. But for someone who has put this passion project on pause for much of this year for tend to a new family reality but who has just got back from a city he loves so very much, this blogger decided that he did not want to wait to let it all out after letting it marinate a bit before it's published on here. Hence, this post began its draft just eighteen hours after he departed his favorite city on this planet and returned home back to reality, and now it sees light on my biggest weekend.

All Photos Courtesy of... ME!

On this long Veteran's Day weekend, I'm celebrating my birthday smack dab in the middle of the busiest time of year when it comes to celebrating the holidays: today, November 13, falls right in between Halloween and Thanksgiving with the ensuring Christmas season riding on its coattail. Off of this site, I've been marking it with the ones who I love the most, and who are my greatest supporters: my family and a few of my relatives who flew in from New Jersey. But in many ways more than you can count, the #DCBDay celebrations began two weeks early just two weeks ago -- as it normally is the case in this guy's calendar. And when it comes to getting the party started, there's no better place to get to celebrate an early birthday than in the ultimate of happy places that there is on this earth.

So much has changed in my life since the last time I went to Las Vegas: mid-November of 2021 came at almost a last-minute kind of trip being booked a month beforehand instead of two, and I got to go on my first big vacation since this world changed like night and day a few months after that tenth trip. But as I got to stay in the luxurious Wynn tower, did an all-nighter at the town's newest hotel across the street at Resorts World and paid my first visit to downtown, there was no hint that the perfect world of this blogger and his family would turn upside down. This was the last vacation my dad would ever go on in his 71-year-old life, and four months before the heartbreaking news that he had been diagnosed with an incurable form of brain cancer that would claim him the following summer.

Mariano loved going to Vegas as much as I did and go to the casinos as much as my mom... and as we continued to mourn his absence a year after his death, the feeling has always been there to recapture that Vegas feeling. Just that jealousy I had for those in my inner circle who flew there on weekend trips and gave me no advanced warning over the summer, and being a loyal viewer of the daily flood of Vegas YouTube videos only fueled the anticipation I had of going back once again. But fear not, earlier this summer my mom booked that flight for the pre-Halloween weekend... so started the 127-day leadup that culminated in that twelfth #DCVegas trip just like the anticipation sports fans like me have for an NFL season or most especially the Olympics: everything all leading up to a few weeks ago.