Las Vegas Sept-07

Trip Report: Las Vegas, Sept-07

I have heard that the Las Vegas Strip has been designed and built with one purpose in mind. That purpose is to suck as much money as it can out of your pockets in as short a time frame as possible. I decided to put that theory to a test during a recent trip to the city. But first some background (the educational content of this report) on the "Entertainment Capital of The World".

Las Vegas is located in the center of Vegas Valley, a desert region of about 600 square miles, which is surrounded by the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Spring Mountains. The seasons are hot, windy, and dry, with desert conditions and maximum temperatures of around 120 degrees F during the summer. The mountains around Las Vegas reach elevations of over 10,000 feet, acting as barriers to moisture from the Pacific Ocean. Rainfall is minimal and there are about 216 clear days during the year.

The city was incorporated in 1911. In 1931 there was the legalization of casino gambling in Nevada. The gaming and entertainment industries boomed in Las Vegas after World War II. A street lined with large, glittering casino hotels came to be known as the "Strip"; downtown, in Casino Center, lavish palaces featured the country's top entertainers. By the 1950s Las Vegas had become synonymous with the unique form of recreation it had created.
I arrived in Las Vegas in early September and the summer heat was already fading. The daily high was always between 100 and 105 degrees. But, as the locals say, it is a dry heat. I spent the first afternoon wandering up and down the strip, getting a feel for the place. I could feel the money being pulled out of my pocket with every step.

The first vampires are the tour salespeople. They lure you in with some easy questions like "where are you from?" and with an offer of $10 show tickets, reduced tour prices and hundreds of dollars worth of meal coupons. All you have to do is sit through a three hour time share sales pitch. No thanks.

The sidewalks are also lined with guys handing out business cards for young women who were just sitting by the phone waiting for my call. Apparently there are a lot of young women in Vegas that love to talk to middle aged business men (like Scooter). They really should get friends their own age or take up sports. The guys would flick their cards to attract your attention as you walk by. That gets real annoying really fast. Their T-shirts (and the signs on mobile billboards) announce "Girls delivered direct to you in 20 minutes". That’s faster than you can get a pizza delivered.

Every hotel and casino, as well as most restaurants, have decided that the threshold for the price of a bottle of domestic beer is $6. That wasn’t going to work for my frugal nature so I went looking for more reasonable options and found one right up the strip from the hotel. The Salsa Cantina offers good Mexican food at reasonable prices and a bottle of cold Pacifico is $3. Or a bucket of 6 bottles for $15. I highly recommend the place based on food quality, service and value. Stop by and tell them I sent you.

We took in a view of the Strip and the surrounding area from the top of the Eiffel Tower at the Paris Hotel. The top observation deck is at 460’ above street level compared to 1020’ of the Eiffel Tower in Paris but you still get a great view of the surrounding area. A trip for two to the top was $18 but we bought some bootleg discount coupons and saved $5.

Day 2 was devoted to a road trip to the Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon. Scooter pulled into town the night before and rented a luxurious 2008 Aveo (dubbed The Red Roller Skate) for our tour. The car was so small that when we stopped for snacks we had to rearrange seating just to get the bag of Doritos inside. Winnebago’s towing bigger cars than ours passed us on the highway. The 4-cylinder 1.6 liter engine provided neck-snapping acceleration (if you neck was made of cooked spaghetti) and could take some of the hills without slowing down too much. The bright side was that the car was extremely red and was the most comfortable small car I have been in. Even after ten hours of both driving and riding the car my back didn’t hurt and my legs weren’t cramped. The other bright side was that Scooter paid for the car rental. We pulled out of Vegas in the early morning and headed east to the Hoover Dam.

Construction on the Hoover Dam—originally the Boulder Dam—on the Colorado River was begun in 1931, bringing to the area thousands of men seeking employment. And girls delivered direct to them in under 20 minutes. The seventy-story-high dam, which is regarded as one of the wonders of the modern world, still supplies affordable power to parts of California, Arizona, and Nevada. It is still pretty impressive despite its age and I especially liked the Art Deco styling. Another neat thing about the dam is that you can walk over it, lean right over the edge and look down the face of the dam to the power house and Colorado River below. After a brief visit it was back into the Red Roller Skate and off to the Grand Canyon.

I told some guy that I met in the Salsa Cantina that I had visited the Grand Canyon. He told me how he thought that it was amazing how a meteorite’s impact could cause such a hole in the earth. His theory would have been better, but still not correct, if aliens had been involved somehow but we all know (or do we?) that the Grand Canyon was carved out over 6 million years by the Colorado River.

The terrain changed as we climbed from wide dessert valleys with no vegetation to hills covered in scrub pines to rolling hills with pine and cedar forests. The area around Hoover Dam is extremely rugged and barren with marl outcroppings and hoodoos. Las Vegas is at 2180 feet above sea level and we climbed to 7000 feet at the South Rim of the Canyon.

We visited the South rim of the canyon. The views are incredible. What more can I say? Even the photos I took don’t fully express the scenery. Descriptive words fail me so I’ll throw out a bunch of facts. The South Rim is 7000 feet above sea level and 4600 feet above the Colorado River that runs through the Canyon. The Canyon is 10 miles across at the South Rim viewing posts. The Canyon is aptly named.

The other activity that Vegas is known for (besides gambling and girls delivered direct to you in under 20 minutes) are the lavish shows. We had great debates over what types of show to see. The problem isn’t that there isn’t a selection, the problem is that there is too much of a selection. My choices included Wayne Newton (a Strip staple since the Glory Days of Vegas) and the Mini Celebrity Impersonator Show. They had a mini-Elvis, a mini-Madonna and a mini-Britney Spears. The mini-Britney didn’t really look much like Britney except she was blonde and had a one-piece pink plastic jumpsuit. But, as we all know, Wisconsin is the cheese state, not Nevada, so my choices got shot down and we took in a show typical of Broadway instead. It was good but there wasn’t a midget in the whole cast.

One great sight in Vegas that is actually free (no hidden costs, no time-share seminar, no entrance fee…) is the Dancing Fountains at the Bellagio Hotel. The $40 million Bellagio fountain show is equipped with 1,200 nozzles and 4,500 lights, making it the most expensive and ambitious water feature in Vegas. The range of movement across the lake is varied; some of the movement is continuous, responding to the smooth passages of music, while other water jets are rapidly pulsing, reaching heights as high as 240 feet. We especially enjoyed the fountains that played to Elvis’ Viva Las Vegas.

And the final portion of this Trip Report, two top / bottom lists based on the recent experience.

Top Eight List (or Eight Things About Vegas That I Like)
8. Constant sunshine
7. Casino lights
6. The view from the top of the Eiffel Tower
5. Mexican restaurant with $3 bottles of Pacifico
4. Drinking in the streets

3. The Hoover Dam
2. The Grand Canyon
1. The Bellagio Dancing Fountains doing Elvis’ "Viva Las Vegas"

Bottom Ten List (or Things About Vegas That I Can Do Without)
10. Not enough to do on the Strip if you don’t gamble
9. Not enough fun things to make up a more positive Top Ten List
8. Guys handing out Call Girl fliers
7. The slot machine bells
6. The heat
5. Too-old women trying to look too-young through the use of mini-skirts and make up.
4. Time share sales reps
3. $15 inner tube rentals at the "free" hotel pool
2. $6 for a bottle of domestic beer
1. Mimes and other street performers