My first trip to a casino was shortly after I turned 21, with my parents on a trip to Foxwoods. I remember losing and didn't "love" it so I never went again.

Fast forward to age 25 when Jeremy proposed. We both wanted a small, low key wedding... but our parents had other plans. Mine had been planning my big fat italian wedding probably since birth, and Jeremy's family also wanted a grand affair, so our low key vision wasn't really an option. We didn't want to hurt our parents and got kind of swept up in it. One day I was fed up and threatened that we would go to vegas to elope because I hated all the wedding planning.

So when we booked a weekend in Vegas a few months before our wedding, everyone else thought we would do what we threatened.

Well, we didn't elope. But we had a great time, staying at Excalibur and even hit a "jackpot" on a quarter powerball machine. And it started. We said we would go back for our first anniversary. And we did. And every year since then for the past 9 years