Las Vegas

I am waiting for my flight to take me back home. I have just spent the last four days in Egypt, Paris, New York, Venice and Monte Carlo. No, I haven’t been globetrotting, I’ve been in Las Vegas! Having never visited Las Vegas before, I cannot compare it to the Vegas of twenty or thirty years ago, but as I’ve heard it said, “This isn’t the Vegas your grandmothers visited”. Most of the old “rat pack” hotels are no longer around. They have been replaced by enormous, (11 of the 12 largest hotels in the world are in Las Vegas) mostly “theme” hotels.

The Paris Hotel has a half scale Eiffel Tower as well as a replica of the Arc de Triomphe. All of the restaurants and shops have French themes and are located on Parisian “streets” that meander through the hotel.

The New York-New York from the outside is a scaled down version of the New York skyline with a Statue of Liberty, Empire State building,Chrysler building, even the Brooklyn Bridge. Inside the “streets” are named after famous streets in New York with the restaurants and shops carrying through with the theme as well. There are even manholes emitting steam.

The Venetian is one of the newest of the theme hotels to open and houses a large shopping area complete with “St. Marks Plaza” and a quarter mile long “Grand Canal” with gondolas and singing gondoliers.

We stayed in the Egyptian themed Luxor, shaped like a huge glass pyramid. You enter the hotel through a ten story high Sphinx. There are replicas of Egyptian artifacts and statues, Ramses, hieroglyphics, scarabs and cobras on the walls. The rooms in the pyramid section have to be entered by riding a 39 degree inclinator. There are two newer tower sections with rooms which is where we stayed. The rooms were quite spacious and tastefully decorated with an Egyptian theme without being tacky. The rooms had all the usual amenities except coffeemakers.(You have to go through the casino to get coffee. In fact, you have to go through the casinos to get anything and to go anywhere. I wonder why that is??????????)

Most of the hotels we visited were on the strip with the exception of the Hard Rock Hotel which was about a mile and a half back from thestrip, and the Golden Nugget which was downtown. The “strip” is the Las Vegas Boulevard hotel zone and is about four miles long from the Mandalay Bay hotel on the south end to the Stratosphere on the north end. Prepare to do a lot of walking if you plan on venturing out of your hotel and visiting the others on the strip. You can take a cab and the city buses run up and down the strip twenty four hours a day, but the best way to get a real feel for Las Vegas is to walk the strip, especially at night when the neon comes.

There is plenty to do in Las Vegas even if you are not a gambler. If you are, you will think you have gone to heaven. There are always great shows playing with long running ones such as Siegfried and Roy as well as newer ones such as Cirque Du Soliel and The Blue Man Group. There are different headliners every week. There are tours to the Grand Canyon, Hoover Damn, Laughlin and many others and most hotels have a show and tour desk to assist you with tickets. Some fun and free things to catch are the light and fountain show in front of the Bellagio, the erupting volcano in front of the Mirage, the pirate battle in front of Treasure Island, and the Fremont Street Experience which is an overhead light and music show in downtown Las Vegas. It is also worth the walk or cab ride to the Stratosphere on the north end of the strip to go up in the tower(for a small fee). The Stratosphere tower is the tallest freestanding tower in the country and you get a great view of Las Vegas and the mountains that surround the city.

There are thousands of restaurants to choose from and a lot of the better known chefs have opened up chic restaurants in Vegas. We had a fabulous dinner at Lupo, a Wolfgang Puck Restaurant in Mandalay Bay. Every strip hotel had a buffet serving breakfast, lunch and dinner at very reasonable prices. We had the lunch buffet at the Mirage and it was quite impressive but the dinner buffet at the Luxor was a big disappointment. The strip hotels also all have a twenty four hour coffee shop.

I find it hard to remember exactly what my preconceived impression was of Las Vegas before I visited it, but I was pleasantly surprised with it. If you haven’t been to Las Vegas lately or if you have never been, you should definitely plan on going!