“How far away do you think the airport will be?â€
“I don’t know. Probably pretty close. Maybe like 20 minutes?â€
Well, how about 30 seconds. Touching down at McCarran International Airport you’re forgiven for wondering (sweating) if you’ll land right on the casino floor of the Tropicana, or the Luxor, or Mandalay Bay, or the gargantuan MGM Grand. This kind of typifies my Las Vegas impression in a nutshell — I can’t get rid of an image of a 10 or 11 year old kid sitting in the middle of his bedroom floor (desert) building an ultra-modern right-from-the-box city out of legos and placing the airport terminals and landing strips right next to everything else. Why not? Hop on, hop off... Convenience equals money. More precisely, it’s like the kid is doing extreme legos while kicking some serious ass playing Monopoly and lining up massive hotel after massive hotel in a row (the so-called “Stripâ€).
I guess they call Vegas the “City of Sin†or “Sin City,†but they might as well call it the “City of Replicas.†Virtually everything is a replica of something else, and as truly impressive as the replicas are on the one hand, they seem very sad on the other... like your image of an old Western saloon town, on a movie-set, where everything is just a faux-front, with nothing substantial behind the stand-up cardboard.
This isn’t quite fair, because each establishment does have substance, at least a decadent superficial substance, with luxuriously appointed hotel suites, fine restaurants, upscale shopping, fancy pools, and some signature novelty like a real / fake “active†volcano (The Mirage). With virtually no physical separation between them, each “resort†has a faux-theme (signature novelty), compacted down to almost a mockery of its namesakes. (Let’s be honest... it is all a mockery, albeit a mockery that gushes money.) Paris, with a truncated but working Eiffel Tower... The Venetian, replete with water-filled canals, gondolas, and singing gondoliers... and New York, New York, with the Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge, Empire State Building, other skyscrapers, hints of 5th and/or Madison Avenues and Broadway, and a roller coaster (Coney Island?) jammed into the middle of the caricature all clustered together without boundaries within a single city block.
There is a sense that the whole thing — meaning all of Vegas (or at least the Strip, including the airport) — could be rolled up and packed into a few tractor-trailers and create a new standard for the traveling carnival. In other words, my strong impression is that there is no rhyme or reason for Las Vegas to be in Las Vegas. The kid could be building and plopping down his little model city / carnival ANYWHERE... unless of course the key factor is the 110 degree heat, that dry heat you hear about, in which case Vegas could be plopped down anywhere along the equator as long as it doesn’t rain. Or maybe the remoteness is also a critical placement factor, critical in the “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas†sense.
As I think some more, I am sure the remoteness is key. There is a flavor of the few blocks around 42 Street in NYC being transported to the desert, with the differences being that the decibels are turned down a couple of notches, you’re not quite as frenetically panicked about being mugged or having $500 taken off you blind (that’s saved for the casinos), and most importantly you’re not so worried that a plainclothes Federal agent wearing a wire is about to take you into custody. Compared to NYC, there is a sense in Vegas that you just might get way with anything. My favorite Vegas slogan is attached to The Cosmopolitan — “Just the right amount of wrong.†And how can you not at least think a little wrong when you’re bludgeoned with ultra-seductive nightclub advertisements on video screens and names like “Tryst†and “Tabu�
Vegas seems to be all about comfort, dazzled comfort... mixing glitz and a ton of lights with the familiar, and convenience. Even in terms of the “sin†part, the goal is to make you as comfortable as possible to pull the trigger (and open your wallet) on sin. The heat is like a sedative, clouding your sensorium just enough to yield the amount of impulsivity necessary to gain your compliance with all that Vegas has to offer. And that “dry heat†thing. Let’s clear that up. It’s more like a baked heat, baking you into submission, making your entire body just rubbery and melty enough so that you’ll (at least unenthusiastically) half-consciously keep feeding those slot machines with dollar bills (and that’s before the alcohol!).
For having virtually nothing endemic to itself, other than miles and miles of hot dirt desert, Vegas does provide almost everything... again, usually in some replica form. There are the shopping outlets (North and South) on either side of the Strip, basically replicas of what you’ll find in Kittery, Maine and the Tangors in New Hampshire. There is a go-kart/raceway amusement park. There is a “Dig It†amusement park with real-life bulldozers and other heavy equipment where you can fulfill all of your pre-latency age fantasies digging up and moving dirt around... I’m not kidding. You can participate in favorite television show adventures where you enter and become part of a CSI plot, or a theme like the Las Vegas Mob Experience... “arrive innocent, leave guilty.†You can take in a taping and try to be a contestant on The Price is Right. You can do a flight simulator, skydive, or even “shoot a real machine gun†(i.e. “MP5, UZI... AK47, M16... M249 Sawâ€) at The Gun Store. You can go to the Stratosphere where you may skyjump or ride a tilt-a-whirl off the side near the top of its space needle design, or you can choose to have a nice meal in the rotating restaurant and watch other fools jumping in search of a perfect snapshot to send to buddies back home.
And then there are the shows... so many shows. There are the “specialty†shows like The Chippendales and one with topless vampire ladies, “Motown revues†with four Australian white guys, Celine, and Donny and Marie, and Penn and Teller, and imposter “Rat Pack†and Streisand and Sinatra ensembles, and of course plenty of Elvis impersonators. How Donny and Marie make sense in Vegas I don’t want to try to understand, and the same for why Celine would permanently station her worldclass self in such an odd place. The shows actually are very good, or so I hear, but you never get away from that replica-esque quality. There is the Cirque du Soleil... but in 12 different flavors. And I have to mention David Copperfield, partaken by my two kids. My first question was how David Copperfield could still be performing, thinking he had to be at least 80, but it turns out he is really 463 (which sort of explains his whole deal).
One bit of advice to those planning vacations. Do the Grand Canyon separately! Otherwise, you just get the Grand Canyon Experience — a day trip so grueling that you’re reduced to wistfully looking forward to when you’ll finally arrive back at your hotel. Doing the Grand Canyon as part of your Vegas experience ends up falling into the same replica-esque motif, very souvenir-esque, and soft-serve, and don’t forget your family picture taken with your personal pilot outside the puddlejumper that will make you sicker than a dog... and don’t forget the Canyon DvD to sear those once-in-a-lifetime memories into your brain forever. The Grand Canyon is magnificent (and I liked the helicopter ride), but one of the “seven wonders of the world†simply deserves better than being just another Vegas “show.â€
The gambling... sorry, but I mostly avoided it, so I have little to say beyond commenting that every resort hotel seems to have a sea of slot machines with plenty of customers cozied up to one with drink in tow and cigarette dangling from an ash tray. I spent maybe a $100 total, and most of that on the airport slots. And I strongly preferred machines for poker that I sort of thought I understood, rather than the theme/fruit-based slots where I still can’t figure out if 3 lemons are good or bad. I like the slots that require at least one decision, as opposed to complete, arbitrary luck. Except for the fact that you couldn’t walk through any area free from casino territory, I found the gambling easy enough to ignore, which is perhaps the surprise (a good one) of Vegas. You can enjoy all of the other resort-y aspects, including superb restaurants, without feeling required to gamble at all.
I enjoyed my time in Vegas... a good family trip celebrating my mother’s 3/4 of a century mark. I like replicas and a replica-esque world. Although I feigned disgust, I was comforted by finding a “food court†right on the Strip with a Wendys, Subway, Nathans, and the obligatory Chinese outlet (in this case Panda Express). Do you know how good a Coke with just the right amount of ice tastes when it’s 110 F on the street? I doubt I’ll return, which is unfortunate because I’d know how to do Vegas better on a second go ‘round. I imagine folks either go to Vegas one time or more than 10 times.
One lesson probably is that Vegas is not something to overthink. Don’t lapse into wondering where all the employees live (although they seem to have plenty of parking judging by the Wynn’s three huge garages just for staff ), or how much water it takes to keep the Strip golf course so green, or how water gets into Vegas from the Hoover Dam, or why the cab driver on arrival described Vegas as the “worst city in the world†and injected “that Bin Laden guy was more popular here than Obama.†Don’t worry yourself about the various ways that Las Vegas might not make sense.
Just enjoy the carnival in the middle of the desert without a thought about why the carnival would be there.
And of course make sure you are right about how much wrong... so you can still come home.