How to Turn WVC 2026 Into a FRIENDS Getaway
WVC 2026 isn't just another continuing education requirement—it's the perfect excuse to transform professional development into an epic reunion. But here's the thing: it's October 2025 right now, and if you want connecting rooms, that incredible restaurant reservation, or affordable flights, you need to start planning yesterday.
Why This Moment Matters
Life after vet school scatters everyone like dandelion seeds in the wind. Someone's doing emergency medicine in Seattle, pulling overnight shifts and living on coffee. Another opened her own practice in rural Tennessee, navigating the chaos of being both doctor and business owner. You're all drowning in the beautiful mess of appointments and surgeries and the daily reality of veterinary medicine. The group chat still buzzes occasionally—someone sending a weird radiograph, another asking for advice on a tricky case, everyone responding with heart emojis to news of a rough day.
But when was the last time you were all actually together? In the same room, breathing the same air, laughing until your sides hurt?
WVC solves this problem in the most elegant way possible. It's the one time everyone has a legitimate, defensible reason to be in the same city at the same time, doing something that actually advances your careers. The CE credits are real. The hands-on courses in dental techniques, ultrasound, and acupuncture are genuinely valuable. The networking opportunities can change the trajectory of your practice. But beneath all that professional development lies something more precious: the chance to remember who you are when you're not wearing your white coat. To be the people you were before vet school made you into doctors—when you were just friends figuring it out together.
The FOMO is already building. Somewhere right now, your classmates are texting about it. Someone's researching flights in an incognito browser window during lunch. There's probably a preliminary group chat forming that you're not in yet, just a few people throwing out dates and testing the waters. Don't be the person scrolling through Instagram in February, seeing the photos of fountain shows and group dinners and inside jokes being born in real-time, thinking "I should have gone."
The October Advantage: Why Right Now Is Perfect
October 2025 sits in a sweet spot of planning—not so early that it feels premature, not so late that all the good options have evaporated. You're in what travel experts call the Goldilocks zone, but that window is closing faster than you think. Vegas during conference season operates on a different economy. Hotels that seem to have infinite rooms suddenly don't. Restaurants that always have availability mysteriously fill up. Show tickets that were plentiful in September are suddenly "limited seating available."
The psychology of group travel planning requires momentum. Someone needs to be the catalyst, the person who transforms "we should totally do this someday" into "we're doing this and here are the dates." That person might as well be you. Send the text this week: "WVC 2026—who's in?" Watch how quickly the responses flood in. Create a simple poll for dates since the conference typically runs Sunday through Thursday in late February. Have an honest conversation about budget ranges early, before anyone's expectations get misaligned. Set a decision deadline—end of October works perfectly—because without deadlines, group decisions drift into infinity.
By the end of this month, you need confirmed commitments. Not "yeah, probably" or "I'll try to make it work." Real commitments, preferably backed by deposits into a shared travel fund. This is where serious planning separates from wishful thinking. Once you know who's actually coming, you can start researching hotel options together, comparing flight prices, and making the crucial decision about accommodation style that will shape your entire week.
November is when planning becomes action. This is when you book hotel rooms through WVC's official room blocks—and this absolutely cannot wait. These specially negotiated rates at properties like Mandalay Bay, Luxor, and MGM Grand fill up months in advance, sometimes disappearing entirely by January. You'll also want to purchase conference registration in November to catch early bird pricing that saves somewhere between one and two hundred dollars per person. That's real money that could fund a spectacular dinner or show tickets. Start your shared planning document now, create a group payment plan if people need to spread out costs, and begin building the infrastructure that will make this trip seamless instead of stressful.
December brings the flight booking window when holiday sales sometimes offer surprising deals. This is also when you start the fun part—researching restaurants where you might celebrate, browsing show options, debating whether you're Cirque du Soleil people or comedy show people or both. Request time off work officially rather than hoping you can figure it out later. Begin the countdown in your group chat. Let the anticipation build.
January transforms planning into reality. This is when you finalize dinner reservations at restaurants that book exactly 30 days in advance and won't budge on that policy. You'll buy show tickets, plan group activities, and create the detailed itinerary that will live in everyone's phone. Weekly check-in video calls become essential now, keeping everyone engaged and ensuring no detail falls through the cracks. Someone needs to maintain the master spreadsheet, another person should handle restaurant research, a third coordinates activities. Distributed responsibility prevents burnout and makes everyone feel invested in creating something amazing together.
By early February, you're just confirming final details, packing, and managing the nervous excitement that comes before any big trip. That last group video call to review plans becomes part of the ritual, the moment when it fully hits you: this is actually happening.
The Art of the Hotel Deal
Hotels during WVC operate in their own unique ecosystem, one that rewards early planning and punishes procrastination with stunning efficiency. The conference negotiates special room blocks at partner properties, creating a parallel hotel universe where rates are discounted, rooms are guaranteed during what would otherwise be a sold-out period, and attendees sometimes enjoy perks like complimentary internet or waived resort fees that can add another thirty to fifty dollars per night in savings.
Understanding how to navigate WVC's room blocks gives you a significant advantage. You'll book through links on the conference website rather than going directly to hotel sites, a process that feels slightly counterintuitive since we're all trained to comparison shop. But these negotiated rates typically beat anything you'd find on your own, and they come with the added security of knowing you have a room during a period when Vegas hotels can legitimately sell out. The Mandalay Bay Convention Center becomes the hub for WVC, making properties like Mandalay Bay itself, the connected Luxor, and nearby MGM Grand especially convenient. You're looking at either a short walk or a free tram ride to get to morning sessions, which matters significantly when you're trying to make an eight AM lecture after staying out until midnight the night before.
The real magic happens when you request connecting rooms. This single detail transforms a good trip into a great one. Instead of five separate hotel rooms scattered across different floors where everyone retreats to their own space after dinner, connecting rooms create a shared headquarters. You get ready for evenings together, music playing while everyone's doing makeup and debating outfit choices. You have impromptu wine sessions at eleven PM, processing the day's lectures and laughing about the ridiculous things that happened at the exhibit hall. Someone has a crisis about what shoes to wear to dinner, and instead of frantic group texts, you just walk through the connecting door and hold up both options for immediate feedback.
Getting connecting rooms requires strategy, not just hope. After you book through the WVC room block, call the hotel directly. Hotels love conference attendees because they're guaranteed business, so emphasizing that you're part of the WVC group gives you leverage. The script is simple but effective: explain that you have multiple rooms booked in the conference block and would like them connected or adjoining. Get the name of the person helping you and ask them to add detailed notes to your reservation. Call back in January to confirm those notes still exist in the system. Call again two weeks before arrival. Then, when you check in, mention it pleasantly to the front desk agent while having a twenty-dollar bill folded discreetly in your hand. That tip, offered after they confirm they've made the arrangement, often makes the difference between "we'll try" and "I've made sure you're all together."
The math of group accommodations gets interesting when you start thinking beyond traditional hotel rooms. Four individual rooms in a WVC block property might run one hundred fifty dollars per night each, totaling six hundred dollars daily for your group. But a two-bedroom suite at MGM Grand or the Signature often costs between four and five hundred dollars per night total. Divided by four people, that's one hundred to one hundred twenty-five dollars each—potentially cheaper than separate rooms while giving you exponentially more space and shared living areas. You get two private bedrooms for people who need their own space, plus a living room that becomes your group's home base. Many suites include kitchenettes where you can stock breakfast supplies and late-night snacks, adding another layer of savings and convenience.
For larger groups of five or six, the numbers become even more compelling. Three-bedroom suites or penthouses that sound extravagantly expensive often divide into per-person costs competitive with standard rooms. A seven-hundred-dollar-per-night suite split six ways is about one hundred seventeen dollars each. You're paying standard room prices but living in a space that makes you feel like you've absolutely made it in life. The suite becomes legendary in your group's history—"Remember that penthouse in 2026?"—in a way that separate standard rooms never could.
The cost of waiting reveals itself in harsh clarity. Hotels within WVC blocks don't just get more expensive as February approaches; they disappear entirely. By January, you might find yourself scrambling for anything available, ending up at properties far from the conference venue where the "deal" you found costs more than the original WVC block rate would have. Flights follow similar patterns, often jumping thirty to fifty percent closer to travel dates. Conference registration loses its early bird discount. Popular restaurants are fully booked. The total penalty for procrastination easily reaches three to five hundred dollars per person—money that could have funded a Michelin-starred dinner, premium show tickets, or a serious shopping spree.
Eating Well Without Going Broke
Vegas dining exists in a strange parallel dimension where a meal can cost anywhere from eight dollars to eight hundred, sometimes at restaurants within the same hotel. Learning to navigate this landscape strategically means you can eat spectacularly well without triggering a financial crisis that haunts you for months after you return home.
Breakfast represents the easiest place to save serious money while barely compromising on quality or experience. Vegas breakfast out runs twenty-five to thirty-five dollars per person once you factor in tax and tip. Multiply that by five people and five mornings, and you're staring at over eight hundred dollars just for breakfast. The alternative requires one trip to Walgreens or Target on the Strip your first night, where you'll stock your hotel room or suite with Greek yogurt, granola, fresh fruit, bagels, cream cheese, and coffee supplies. If your accommodation includes a kitchenette, add eggs, bread, avocados, and butter. This entire shopping trip costs fifty to seventy-five dollars total and feeds everyone all week. You've just saved seven hundred dollars as a group—more than enough to fund your splurge dinner at Nobu.
The breakfast-in-room strategy offers benefits beyond financial savings. You control timing instead of waiting for restaurant tables or room service. You can eat in pajamas while reviewing the conference schedule for the day. Someone inevitably tells the story that has everyone crying with laughter before you've even left the hotel. These casual morning moments, completely unglamorous and thoroughly documented in unflattering photos that will live forever in your group chat, often become some of the most treasured memories.
Lunch during conference days requires efficiency more than elegance. You're usually on limited time between sessions, wearing comfortable shoes that have already logged several miles, and more focused on fueling up than creating an experience. Hotel food courts at properties like MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay offer decent variety in the twelve to eighteen dollar range. Quick slice joints like Secret Pizza hidden on the third floor of the Cosmopolitan have cult followings for good reason. Grab-and-go options from CVS or Walgreens—premade sandwiches and salads—cost eight to twelve dollars and let you maximize time at the conference instead of waiting for restaurant service. The strategy is straightforward: keep lunch light and efficient, saving your appetite and your budget for dinner when you have time to actually enjoy the experience.
Dinner is where Vegas reveals both its extravagance and its surprising accessibility, often simultaneously. Planning five or six dinners over the course of your trip requires strategic thinking about where to splurge and where to save. The framework that works best designates one dinner as the celebration night where money becomes nearly irrelevant. This is your Nobu dinner, your Carbone experience, your evening at é by José Andrés where the tasting menu alone costs one hundred fifty dollars before wine. You save for this dinner specifically, plan it midweek when you've hit your stride, and go all in without guilt or hesitation.
The secret to affording genuinely expensive restaurants lies in ordering family-style instead of individual entrees. When everyone orders their own sixty-five dollar main course, you've just spent over three hundred dollars on entrees alone before appetizers, drinks, or dessert. Instead, order six or seven shareable plates—sushi rolls at Nobu, innovative small plates at Beauty & Essex, spectacular appetizers anywhere—and you'll spend one hundred fifty to one hundred eighty dollars total while actually tasting more dishes. Everyone experiences more variety, no one leaves uncomfortably full, and you've saved enough money to afford excellent wine or that dessert everyone wants to try. This approach works at expensive restaurants because it's how their menus are designed to be enjoyed anyway. You're not being cheap; you're eating the way the chef intended.
Two dinners should fall into the nice-but-not-crazy category of fifty to seventy-five dollars per person. Mon Ami Gabi overlooking the Bellagio fountains delivers that iconic Vegas view without the four-figure dinner bill. Lago at Bellagio creates romance and elegance through ambiance and excellent Italian food. Yardbird at the Venetian serves Southern comfort food so good you'll dream about their fried chicken for months. These restaurants offer the experience of dining out in Vegas—getting dressed up, making reservations, feeling special—without requiring you to check your bank account nervously the next morning.
Two dinners can be thoroughly casual at twenty-five to forty dollars per person, and casual Vegas dining punches way above its price point. Tacos El Gordo serves some of the best Mexican food you'll find anywhere, period, and your entire meal with drinks costs under thirty dollars. Secret Pizza's cult following exists because it's genuinely great New York-style pizza, not just convenient. Hash House A Go Go's portions are so absurdly large that you'll take photos of your plate before you can possibly believe it. These meals feel like discovering local secrets, the places where you stumble in after a long conference day still wearing your name badge and leave happy and full without drama.
One evening should embrace the happy hour as dinner strategy that Vegas does surprisingly well. Places like FUSEbar at The LINQ offer eight-dollar small plates and eight-dollar cocktails from three to six PM, and suddenly you're having an excellent meal with drinks for forty dollars per person. Ordering heavy appetizers to share—truffle fries, sliders, wings, quesadillas—creates a legitimate dinner, not just snacks. The atmosphere is fun and casual, you're saving sixty or seventy dollars per person compared to a full dinner, and you still have energy and budget left for whatever comes next in the evening.
The drinking budget requires honest conversation before the trip because this is where costs spiral fastest. Casino cocktails cost eighteen to twenty-two dollars. Club drinks run twenty to thirty. Have three drinks at a nightclub and you've just spent ninety dollars before you realized what happened. The most effective strategy embraces what some might call pre-gaming but is really just smart economics. Buy bottles at CVS, Walgreens, or Target—emphatically not at hotel shops where markup borders on criminal—and make drinks in your room before heading out. This saves fifteen to twenty dollars per person per night, adding up to several hundred dollars over the week that could fund something memorable instead of disappearing into overpriced vodka sodas.
Casino floor drinks maintain their legendary free status as long as you're gambling, though "free" really means tipping your cocktail server five dollars per round. That's still dramatically cheaper than bar prices, and the spectacle of playing blackjack with your friends while cocktail servers navigate the floor creates its own entertainment value. At dinner, splitting bottles of wine instead of ordering individual cocktails makes both economic and social sense. A fifty-dollar bottle divided five ways costs ten dollars per person versus eighteen-dollar cocktails. Order house wine at casual restaurants. Skip cocktails entirely at expensive restaurants where they cost twenty-five to twenty-eight dollars each and don't actually taste any better than cocktails elsewhere.
Some people in your group might not drink at all, and Vegas works beautifully sober. The shows, the food, the people-watching, the sheer energy of the place—none of that requires alcohol. You'll save hundreds of dollars, actually remember everything that happens, and wake up for morning lectures without hangovers. Zero judgment should exist around drinking choices. Do what works for you, respect what works for others, and let the experience speak for itself.
Shows in Vegas range from essential to skippable, from affordable to absurd. Booking in October or November gets you better seats at better prices for performances that might sell out entirely by January. Avoiding Saturday night performances immediately cuts costs since that's when prices peak. Matinee shows often cost less while delivering identical quality, plus they leave your evenings free for dinner and other adventures. Day-of discount booths like Tix4Tonight scattered around the Strip offer legitimate savings of up to fifty percent, but you're gambling on availability for popular shows.
The group should budget for one amazing show as your collective experience. Cirque du Soleil's "O" at the Bellagio creates water-based magic that feels impossible. "Absinthe" at Caesars delivers raunchy comedy and acrobatics in an intimate setting that leaves you breathless from laughing. These aren't cheap—expect to spend one hundred fifty to two hundred fifty dollars per person for good seats—but they create the kind of shared memory that justifies the cost. You'll talk about this show for years. Make it worth talking about.
The total realistic budget for an amazing WVC 2026 trip, if you book now and plan strategically, runs about twenty-one hundred to three thousand dollars per person. That covers five nights in a hotel, conference registration with early bird pricing, flights booked by December, food using all these strategies, one great show, transportation, and miscellaneous expenses with a buffer for emergencies. If you wait until January, add at least three to five hundred dollars to that minimum, possibly more if WVC room blocks sell out entirely. The monthly savings math is straightforward: set aside five hundred dollars from October through January, and you've got two thousand dollars. Skip lunch out three times per week and you've saved one hundred fifty dollars monthly. Cut back on Starbucks runs and random Amazon purchases, and you're there.
Making It Actually Happen
The difference between trips that happen and trips that live forever in the "we should really do that someday" category comes down to organization. Not the fun kind of planning where you're browsing restaurant menus and debating shows, but the decidedly unglamorous work of spreadsheets and schedules and making sure everyone knows where they're supposed to be when.
Create one master Google Sheet shared with your entire group, then build separate tabs for every category of information you'll need. Who's coming gets its own tab with names, contact information, flight details, emergency contacts, dietary restrictions, and room preferences documented in one place. Budget tracking needs its own space where shared expenses get logged—hotel rooms, group dinners, show tickets, Uber rides—with clear records of who paid for what and who owes whom. Hotel details including confirmation numbers, check-in times, and room assignments prevent the chaos of arrival day when everyone's tired and just wants to find their room. The conference schedule tab shows which WVC sessions each person plans to attend, priority lectures for the group, hands-on workshops, and meeting points between sessions. Restaurant reservations need their own tracking with confirmation numbers, expected costs, dress codes, and how to get there from your hotel. Shows and entertainment require similar detail. A daily itinerary breaks down the week hour by hour for group activities while protecting free time. The packing list coordinates who's bringing shared items so you don't end up with five hair straighteners and zero first aid supplies.
This level of documentation sounds excessive until you're actually on the trip and someone asks "Wait, when's dinner?" and you can simply open the shared calendar on your phone instead of texting back and forth for fifteen minutes while everyone tries to remember. The master spreadsheet becomes the single source of truth, eliminating confusion and the weird tension that emerges when information gets siloed and people feel out of the loop.
Technology solves several group travel problems elegantly if you use it right. A dedicated group chat specifically for WVC 2026—separate from your regular ongoing chat with ten thousand messages about everything else—keeps all trip planning and coordination in one searchable place. Pin important information at the top: the link to your master planning document, hotel address and phone number, emergency contact list. Use the chat before the trip for planning discussions and hype building. During the trip, it becomes your real-time coordination tool for things like "Running ten minutes late" or "We're at the Chandelier Bar, third floor!" Photo sharing happens instantly, capturing hilarious moments while they're still fresh.
A shared Google Calendar dedicated to the trip, accessible on everyone's phones, eliminates the constant questions about timing. Add everyone's flights, check-in and checkout times, all restaurant reservations with addresses, show times with built-in reminders for when to start getting ready, WVC sessions you're attending as a group, and buffer time for the transitions everyone underestimates. Set automatic reminders for twenty-four hours before reservations, two hours before (time to start getting ready), and thirty minutes before (time to leave). The calendar syncs automatically, so there's no excuse for confusion.
Splitwise deserves its own paragraph because this app single-handedly prevents the money awkwardness that can poison group trips. Track every shared expense: hotel rooms, Uber rides split by whoever's in the car, group dinners, show tickets one person bought for everyone, alcohol runs, emergency Target trips for things people forgot. One person enters each expense and tags who it should be split between. The app calculates automatically who owes whom and by how much. At the end of the trip, it generates a settlement plan showing exactly who needs to Venmo whom. Everything's transparent, documented, and fair. Money can make things weird between friends; Splitwise prevents that entirely.
Assigning roles according to people's natural strengths distributes responsibility and makes everyone feel invested. The organizer maintains the master spreadsheet, sends reminder messages, and keeps everyone on schedule—probably you if you're reading this article. The restaurant scout researches dining options and makes reservations, ideally someone who loves food and follows Vegas restaurant accounts on Instagram. The activity coordinator finds shows and entertainment and plans optional activities like pool days. The budget monitor tracks expenses in Splitwise and handles final settlement. The morning person wakes everyone up and gets the group moving for early lectures. The social director takes photos, plans surprise moments, and keeps energy high. The logistics coordinator handles airport pickups, books Ubers, and figures out how to get places efficiently.
Not everyone needs an official role, but having key responsibilities distributed prevents one person from doing everything and quietly resenting it while everyone else coasts. Weekly check-in video calls starting in January keep everyone engaged as planning intensifies. Thirty minutes every Sunday to review progress, make decisions on pending items, adjust plans as needed, share outfit ideas, and build collective excitement makes the planning process itself part of the bonding experience.
The Week You'll Remember Forever
Sunday arrival day sets the tone for everything that follows. Flights stagger naturally as people book based on their schedules and flight prices, so use your group chat for real-time updates as people land and make their way to the hotel. The first person to arrive gets checked in and texts everyone their room number, creating a meetup point for whoever arrives next. By late afternoon, everyone's there, hugging in the hotel lobby or someone's room, the nervous excited energy of reunion crackling through conversations that start and stop and layer over each other as you try to catch up on months of life in minutes.
That first evening should be deliberately casual. You're tired from travel, people are still settling in, and you have conference early tomorrow. Choose a restaurant that's walkable or a short Uber ride, somewhere like Mon Ami Gabi or Lago where you can get a table without too much drama. Order appetizers to share, keep it relatively light, soak in the reality that you're all actually here together. After dinner, maybe take a quick walk on the Strip to see the lights and watch the Bellagio fountains, then back to the hotel for nightcaps and conversation that will inevitably stretch later than anyone planned. Try to get to bed at a reasonable hour. Tomorrow the conference starts, and you want to be sharp for those morning sessions you specifically came to attend.
Monday brings the first full conference day, and the rhythm you establish now will carry through the week. Breakfast happens in your room between seven and eight, everyone eating yogurt and granola in various states of consciousness while reviewing the day's WVC schedule. Morning sessions run from eight until noon, the time when most people are freshest and when conferences typically schedule their keynotes and most important lectures. You might attend sessions together or split up based on different interests—small animal versus large animal tracks, surgery versus internal medicine, whatever aligns with your individual practices and learning goals. The exhibit hall opens, vendor booths competing for your attention with swag and product demonstrations and companies desperate to scan your badge.
Lunch stays quick and efficient, maybe hitting a food court or grabbing something to go so you can maximize afternoon time. Conference afternoons offer more flexibility—additional sessions, hands-on workshops in dental techniques or ultrasound or acupuncture, or simply time to decompress at the pool if you need a break from information overload. Not everyone needs to make the same choice, and there should be zero guilt about someone skipping afternoon sessions for pool time if that's what they need.
Evening begins with returning to the hotel around five, everyone scattering to their rooms or reconvening in your shared suite space to transition from conference mode to evening mode. Getting ready together between six and seven becomes its own event—someone's Bluetooth speaker playing music, wine or cocktails flowing, the group discussion of outfit options and makeup choices and whether these shoes work or those ones. This daily ritual of transformation, thoroughly documented in mirror selfies and video snippets that will live forever in your camera rolls, creates as many memories as the actual evenings out.
Dinner reservations typically land around seven-thirty or eight, giving everyone time to get ready without rushing but early enough that you still have the whole evening ahead. Monday's dinner should be nice without being your biggest splurge—somewhere like Yardbird or Beauty & Essex where the food is excellent, the atmosphere is fun, and the bill won't trigger financial anxiety. Share stories from the day's lectures, toast to the week ahead, feel the trip really beginning now that the initial travel exhaustion has faded.
After dinner, options multiply. If you booked a show for tonight, head there for an eight or nine PM performance. Otherwise, explore hotels you haven't seen yet, try your hand at blackjack or roulette, find a rooftop bar with views of the Strip, or just wander and people-watch. Vegas at night is its own entity, the lights and energy and sheer spectacle of it creating entertainment that requires no planning. Don't stay out too late—conference continues tomorrow—but also don't rush back. You're here. Be here.
Tuesday follows a similar morning structure with breakfast and priority WVC sessions, the ones everyone wanted to attend together. Lunch offers time to debrief midweek, check in on how everyone's doing, make sure no one's feeling overwhelmed or exhausted or left out. Afternoon brings more flexibility—some people might dive into hands-on workshops that will directly impact their practices, others might need mental health time at the pool to recharge. Both choices are valid. Both choices are necessary.
Tuesday evening could be your happy hour as dinner night, hitting FUSEbar or another spot with excellent deals between five and seven PM. This strategy saves money while still delivering great food and drinks, leaving budget room for later in the week and energy for after-dinner adventures. Tonight might be exploring different hotels—the Cosmopolitan with its hanging chandeliers and art installations, Aria's sleek modernity, the Bellagio's conservatory and fountains. Or maybe light gambling becomes the evening's entertainment, everyone throwing twenty dollars at a roulette wheel and riding the collective excitement of wins and losses that don't really matter. This is the "follow where the night takes us" evening, minimally planned, maximally open to spontaneous joy.
Wednesday morning starts like the others but everyone's feeling it now—the accumulated late nights, the conference information overload, the reality that you're halfway through and time is moving too fast. Final priority sessions happen in the morning, then lunch together offers a midweek anchor point. Wednesday afternoon is officially designated pool time. You've earned this. Hit your hotel pool with books you won't read and sunscreen you'll reapply religiously because desert sun doesn't play games. Order poolside drinks and snacks. Talk about nothing important. Recharge for tonight because Wednesday night is splurge dinner night.
This is the meal you've been saving for, planning for, budgeting for since you started organizing this trip. Reservations at Nobu or Carbone or é by José Andrés or wherever you collectively decided represents the peak Vegas dining experience. Allow extra time to get ready because tonight is special. Dress up more than usual. Take the group photos you'll frame later. Make the evening feel as significant as it is.
Splurge dinner means ordering confidently, trying things you'd never normally try, saying yes to the wine pairing or the upgrade or the special preparation the server recommends. Use the family-style ordering strategy to maximize what you taste while controlling costs, but tonight, cost is secondary. You're celebrating everything—the conference education you're getting, the friendships that brought you here, the fact that you're all still standing in this demanding profession that tries to break people. Order the expensive sushi. Get the truffle supplement. Share the elaborate dessert. You'll remember this dinner for years.
After dinner, find somewhere with a view—a rooftop bar, a terrace overlooking the Strip, even just a good spot to watch the Bellagio fountains. Let the evening unfold naturally. Maybe you end up at a late-night club. Maybe you wander back to your hotel and talk until three AM in someone's room, the kind of deep meaningful conversation that only happens when you're exhausted and happy and away from normal life. However Wednesday night ends, it becomes the night everyone references when they think about this trip.
Thursday morning brings the bittersweet reality of final WVC sessions, last chances to attend lectures you've been meaning to catch, final walks through the exhibit hall to grab remaining swag. Some people have afternoon flights and will leave right after lunch. Others booked evening departures to maximize every possible hour together. Farewell lunch should be somewhere special but casual—a place where you can linger without worrying about the check, where conversation can flow naturally as you process the week together.
For those leaving early, goodbyes happen over lunch with promises to do this again next year, to not let so much time pass before you see each other, to keep the group chat alive with more than just work questions. For those staying later, the afternoon becomes precious found time for last-minute Strip walks, final casino runs, one more viewing of those Bellagio fountains, soaking in every last drop of an experience you know is ending.
The Part That Matters Most
The real value of WVC 2026 as a reunion trip isn't the lectures, though those are genuinely valuable. It's not the dental workshop that will improve your technique or the ultrasound training that will serve your patients well, though both matter. It's not even the Vegas shows or the expensive dinner or the suite with the incredible view.
It's the moment when you're all getting ready for dinner, someone's telling a story about the weirdest case they saw last month, and suddenly everyone's contributing their own weird case story, and you're all laughing so hard someone has to redo their mascara. It's three AM conversations about whether you made the right career choice, whether you'll ever pay off your student loans, whether this profession that demands everything will leave room for the life you want—conversations you can only have with people who understand exactly what you mean because they're living it too.
It's realizing that despite being scattered across different states and different types of practices, despite the months that pass between real conversations, despite how different your daily lives have become, these people still know you in a way few others ever will. They were there when you were becoming who you are now. They understand the before and the after and everything in between.
WVC 2026 gives you permission to prioritize this. To spend money you probably shouldn't spend and take time you probably shouldn't take and invest in relationships that don't advance your career or check any boxes on anyone's definition of productivity. The conference provides the professional justification—look, CE credits!—but the real justification needs no explanation.
You deserve this trip. Your friendships deserve this trip. The version of yourself who isn't "Doctor" all the time deserves to exist fully and joyfully for a week in Vegas with people who love that version maybe most of all.
Send the text. Make the plan. Book the rooms. Your vet school crew is waiting, even if they don't know it yet. February 2026 is coming faster than you think, and you'll spend the rest of your career grateful you made it happen.
