The New Road

Vegas Pictures

As promised, pictures from my recent Vegas trip. Vegas was surprising to me in a lot of ways. I didn't expect it to be ringed by mountains. I didn't expect the Leaving Las Vegas sign to be at the exact end of the strip. I didn't expect the strip to be so short. I certainly didn't expect that downtown of Las Vegas to be as dumpy as it was. I didn't expect that the airport would be about three long blocks off the strip. So close, in fact, that some hotels on the strip are directly across from the tarmac. I was kinda expecting the low-rise urban sprawl but I didn't fully grasp that until I was there.

The hotels blew my mind. I knew they were going to be big, but I wasn't prepared for how big they really were. Ceasar's Palace goes on and on and on and on. Until you just can't imagine it. It's the biggest mall you can imagine, times two, with a casino and a sports book. And that's just one hotel.

Now that I think about it I understand why the airport needs to be so close. If it were further away people would be renting cars and the traffic along the strip would be deadly. As it was it was pretty bad. You just can't imagine how many people were there. These casino floors stretched further than the eye could see and I would say that 75% of the slot seats were occupied. The mass and the scale were not to be readily understood.

And yet it's as if there was a wall between the mega-hotels on the strip and the rest of Las Vegas. The affluence of the casino stopped at the street. Right next to the Bellagio is "Al's Hot Dog Stand" (or something like that). The prosperity is created in that one spot and stays right there or goes back to corporate coffers in some other place. So outside of the casinos Las Vegas itself is not a particularly pretty or well kept town.