My wife and I don’t consider ourselves gamblers. In fact, we don’t even buy lottery tickets. However, about five years ago, we started an annual tradition of spending our wedding anniversary weekend at a casino.
Most of the time, we stay close to home and just go to Ho-Chunk in Wisconsin Dells. But, more recently, we decided to branch out a bit and visited two casinos in Dubuque, Iowa. Even though that gave us a change of scenery, our three reasons for making the trip were the same as they were when we started this tradition.
First, everything is in one place. Since it was our first trip to Dubuque, we actually ventured away from the casino for a little while to check out some of the other area attractions. Most of the time, however, we prefer to keep the driving to a minimum.
The nice thing about casinos is everything is typically in one place. We purposely pick casinos that have their own hotels and restaurants. That way, going out to dinner doesn’t even require us to put on our coats.
There’s nothing like a good game of Poker Online as a practice session before going to the casino to try out the bigger ones with adept players with high stakes to give you the much needed adrenaline rush and then going to the restaurant to devour the choicest delicacies with relish.
Another reason why we visit casinos is to get away from kids. We love our two daughters but need time to ourselves on occasion too, which is the whole point of taking a weekend for just the two of us. And, the last thing we want to do is deal with other people’s kids.
The nice thing about casinos is they typically require you to be 21 just to enter the door. No kids are allowed. That, alone, is worth the drive.
The last reason why we started going to casinos is there’s a chance we can pay for part of our trip. As I said before, my wife and I aren’t normally people who gamble. And, as a result of that, even though we will play the slot machines, we set a very strict limit on how much we are willing to lose (usually $25 each).
That being said, even though we never enter a casino expecting to strike it big, this past year was the only year we didn’t win enough to pay for at least part of our vacation. Usually, we win enough to at least pay for one of our meals and, one year, I was able to pay for our hotel room with casino money. Granted, it’s not something that is guaranteed. However, we wouldn’t even have that opportunity with other vacation destinations.
We have already celebrated our anniversary weekend this year and, because of that, you shouldn’t expect to see us gambling our money away anytime soon. But, come next March, I guarantee you we will be counting our spare change and picking another casino to visit.
