I’m sitting next to the window, looking out. Thick clouds swirl along as we coast through, 36,000 feet above the earth, and turbulence rocks the Boeing 757, sending waves of nausea crashing against the pit of my stomach. I swear I can see the wing of the jet bouncing up and down, and visions of Final Destination - ‘This plane's gonna explode!’ - cloud my mind. My hands grip the skinny arm rests, my toes are curled up into a ball, and my siblings sit next to me, fast asleep and unbothered.

I’ve been on this flight for just under twenty minutes, and my destination - Las Vegas, The City of Sin - is still hours away. The red-eye flight is set for 11:15PM but, to further exacerbate my already heightened anxiety about flying cross-country, the plane doesn't arrive until its takeoff time. I pace around E32, our terminal at DFW, actually considering running back to the car and going back to the cozy small town in which I’ve rarely left.

‘You know, if this plane crashes, they’ll only be able to identify us by our teeth,’ my eleven-year-old brother, Cameron, crones next to me as we buckle our seat belts.

Shooting him my signature look, he quiets down, and I go back to sulking in my anxiety. The 757 comes with cramped seats, semi-cool air conditioning, and catty flight attendants who offer complimentary facades of joviality, served up with a bout of backhanded comments. I'm so nervous, I swear something bad is going to happen - that we're going to crash and end up eating one another like they do in Alive, or trapped on an isolated island like in Lost, killing the chubby kid (Piggy), and sticking a sow's head on a stick and branding it Lord of the Flies - the possibilities were endless this high in the air.

It’s the trials of traveling, however, that changed my worldview.

The flight took off, was up in the air for two hours and eighteen minutes, and landed in Vegas with such force that we joked about having whiplash for the rest of the trip.

Before this trip, I had never traveled to Vegas, and I never expected to. My dad found a job there recently, and we were staying with him just shy of a week.

Surrounded by the Charleston Mountains and the Sheep Range, Las Vegas, Nevada, is the most energetic city I've ever visited. Each day, the scorching, dry desert heat climbed up to at least 111, and my siblings and I got to be kind-of tourists for days - the crowds, lights, noise, and smells were completely new to us, and we were blown away.

Expect to see anything and just about everything when you visit Vegas - flashy, vibrant lights, billboards for Dr. Reefer, exotic dancers and call-girls making their way past in a frenzy, people dressed up like Alan (Zach Galifianakis) from The Hangover, baby Carlos in a BabyBjörn carrier, begging for photos with you - and expect to be completely used to how sexualized and glamorized everything is by the time you leave. There's a twenty-four hour Starbucks on practically every corner, a massive CVS with a plethora of aloe and stomach medicine handy, and multiple Fat Tuesdays - which carries New Orleans-style hurricanes and drinks - bringing on more comparisons between this City of Sin and the blessed Voodoo Capital, and many homeless people lighting up in the streets. I ate the best spaghetti of my life at a casino food court, tried ShakeShack, multiple Italian foods, cutesy brunch places, and took a trip to Red Rock Canyons, where I saw mountains up close for the first time in my life.

Surprisingly, I only saw one Elvis impersonator, something I expected to be more prevalent in walking downtown.

There are so many restaurants, so many 'best burgers in America,' 'biggest this,' 'most vibrant this,' 'we have this, come see this and spend this to get this,' so many shops, so many people, so much heat, so much life. Vegas is the epitome of American culture - everything is big, everything is shiny, everything is specked with a sense of class and gold. Many foreign tourists flock to Vegas for a taste of the 'American Dream' - there's money in every crack and around every corner if you're over 21, promises of love and perseverance, and fatty American foods that are sure to fill any void imaginable. There's so much to do, so much to see, that we didn't even get to everything we planned. We were surrounded by tourists sporting fanny packs, Nike golf visors, and the trustee dad floral button-ups. We walked into The Bellagio, one of the most famous casinos in Vegas, blending in with the swarm of people in their tourist gear, snapping photos and laughing, sunburnt and sweaty from the desert heat and scorching sun that waited outside.

It's seriously only a place that you read about in the news, hear about in songs (Viva Las Vegas by Elvis and Vegas Lights by Panic! At the Disco are the first two songs that pop into my head at this moment), and see in movies about hardcore partying, to plan one last hoorah as you and your friends' death days come aknockin', where people go to drink themselves to death, to take their corny families on vacation, only to cover their children's' eyes from the multiple gentleman's clubs and business cards being passed around throughout the city to advertise these clubs - seriously, people will pass these cards with degrading photos on them to children, to whoever they can, as it is a part of their job requirement to pass the cards out to whoever they can. You name it, Vegas has seen it already, done it already, lived it already.

My former English teacher and other mother, Sara Zimmerman, writes of her adolescence in Vegas, describing it perfectly in her incredible memoir, Vegas Girl(read her book, it's really really good). Las Vegas, she writes, 'is where people notoriously go to become someone other than themselves.' The city has a reputation; there's a sense of awareness dripping out of every super-sized billboard, vibrant light, operatic singer moseying around The Venetian in front of the gelato stand, and in every human statue painted a metallic color to attract the easily-impressed tourists from Montgomery, Alabama. I imagine signs, advertising for travels to the city, reading 'Bigger, Bolder, Vegas,' and they're fitting.

I recall trekking downtown, past people covered in body paint, making mental notes of the numerous Greek Week shirts I saw, wine-drunk moms stumbling down the strip and into the busy road, and so much 80s music that I now confidently know every word to Sunglasses at Night by Corey Hart, and Take on Me by a-ha.

The most significant image I hold in my head from the time I spent in Vegas came when we walked inside a Walgreens, just to feel the comfort of the AC against our sweaty backs. There were homeless men begging for water on the streets, sweating profusely and on the verge of passing out. We sipped water and quickly passed it to them as we walked through, cooling down. When we walked out, there was a homeless man sitting underneath a McDonald's, holding one hand up in the shape of an L, one eye closed, twisting his imaginary film reel, aiming it at my sister and I. This man sits outside of billion dollar casinos, baking in the scorching heat, with nothing to his name but an imaginary camera. I still wonder what was going on in his head, how he got there, how someone could have let him get to such a place, and I felt overcome with sadness, knowing that in a city with such life, and vibrance, there is still such suffering.

Please, do yourself a favor and open yourself up to traveling, anywhere or everywhere. Flying actually isn't too terrible once you've done it a few times - I'm still horrified of air travel after two flights, but it'll pass with time - and any fear, stress, or doubt you have will diminish as soon as you set foot in a new place. There's so much to do, so much to see, so much of the unknown, and we've only seen a small fraction of it. Vegas is a typical tourist city, but it's a city of experience, a city of memories, of parties - it serves as a reminder of life, that it's okay to cut loose and be someone other than yourself, that there's experiences to be had and places to go.