If you're lucky enough to be Irish, you're lucky enough.

Of course, if you’re lucky enough to have really lucky friends, that doesn’t suck either. My extremely lucky friend Katie was in the right bar at the right time and won this Bud Light trip to Vegas package deal. It’s a St. Patrick’s Day/March Madness/Spring Break type thing. So today, we take off for Vegas.

I’ve only been to Vegas once, and it was spring break of our senior year when we poor college kids. Granted, the job title “freelance copywriter” doesn’t exactly scream wealth, but I am moving up in the world. Sort of.

So here’s what I’m hoping this Vegas trip has over the trip of ’06.

- No weird smell. We stayed at the Tropicana last time. In its heyday, I’m sure the Trop was the place to be seen. And rumor is, it’s been completely overhauled. But in 2006, it was neither of these things. It was cheap and we didn’t know any better, so it was our hotel of choice. It was one of the only casinos where the slot machines still spit out actual coins. We were easily the youngest guests by a solid 45 years. It smelled like old lady and older fried food. And that lavender/stale grease scent is not one you want to wake up to.

(Where dreams come true.)

- Winning more than $26.82. Of course, I'm not lucky. And I'm not good at gambling. And when you're only playing the Wheel of Fortune slot machine, you're probably not going to rake in a bunch of money. But a girl can hope. Hey, at least Katie's lucky.

(Jaclyn's winning biiiiiiiig money here.)

- A mini fridge. Where one would normally find a mini fridge, our room was only equipped with a safe. Makes sense, it is Vegas and you might need somewhere safe to store all those buckets of quarters you just won playing the slots. But it left no room for leftovers or, worse, beverages. At the suggestion of the creepy man at the liquor store, we made our own “cooler” out of a cardboard box, a plastic bag and loads of ice. Brilliant idea, toothless liquor store man! Until the ice started to melt and the cardboard box started to disintegrate. That left us with lukewarm Keystones and a soggy cardboard box. Classy.

(Please don't judge.)

- No one sleeping on the floor. We crammed 5 girls into one room. Again, we were poor college kids. It happens. But the floor wasn’t comfortable. Especially when the only place on the floor is the same spot where the “cooler” started to melt earlier that evening.

- No 5 am lockouts. It was our first night. We were beyond excited to be in Las Vegas. We headed out about 10 pm (long after all the elderly in our hotel put out their “do not disturb” door knob hangers and called it an early night) and did our first night right. We rolled in right around 5 am. The perfect time to discover that our electronic key was faulty and we were locked out. It took the maintenance guy upwards of 45 minutes to work his way to our second floor room and fix the lock. Katie called her mom and chatted with her as she got ready for work. I whined a lot. Liz and Erica seemed to keep it together. Jaclyn may or may not have passed out standing up. It was a great time.

(Sometimes we party.)

So here’s hoping this trip is just as fun and maybe a little classier. Probably not much though. It is a Bud Light sponsored event.

(Ten bucks says we try to re-enact this photo taken at Excalibur in '06.)

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. Wish us luck. Slainte.