Street Walking in Las Vegas

The shuttle bus pulls up to the curb. The driver waves a sheet of paper in front of the queue of thirty eager tourists. “It’s full” he shouts as he descends. But before the wave of disappointment completely unfolds down the line, he yells, “Just kidding. There’s room for everybody”. And with that he starts his roll call of our names from the list. I say to my husband that this is the most orderly management of a shuttle I’ve ever seen. Pre-booking the free service from our hotel avoided the stampede of first-come-first-served.

Two by two, everyone boards: some slide comfortably into the plush seat, older ones ease in carefully, a few others take a deep breath and squeeze. It’s the usual mix: those who’ve long earned a little indulgence, those who over-indulge regularly, and those excited to indulge for the first time in their young lives.

Our driver introduces himself then starts his act. “Anyone getting married here? Or celebrating an anniversary?”

Silence.

“Maybe a divorce? You know what they say about Las Vegas. What goes on in Las Vegas…”

A few voices shout out the ending “… stays in Las Vegas.”

“That’s the spirit people.”

I get the sense he’s playing for tips.

It’s a beautiful Saturday afternoon. The sky is a full-bodied blue, the air is fresh. A cleansing breeze rolls off the mountains. We’re driving into town from a resort on the edge of the expanding city and pass stretches of suburban housing, treeless, dusty empty spaces. The city draws closer and I suddenly feel like Dorothy arriving at the foot of the Emerald City. I shade my eyes when I leave the bus.

My notion of the place had been based on movies. I pictured a string of hotels along a single boulevard with lots of neon signs. Big name acts playing the circuit for years at a time. The colossal sign on the MGM building says, “The City of Entertainment”, and all my life I took that to mean the experience of Las Vegas was all about shows, an inside world, with days and nights bookended by dazzling stage entertainments, cocktails, fancy restaurants, flickering casino lights.

All of that’s true of course, but the experience is more than that. Going to town by itself is an entertainment on the street. The new city is a theme park, a celebration of famous places and symbols. You walk over pedestrian bridges and up outdoor escalators, to reach such icons of human engineering as a two-thirds replica of the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty. Even the air traffic in and out of the nearby airport, seems to perform for pedestrians. As another airplane traces its descent across the horizon between buildings, so close you might touch the airstream, a young woman drops her straw in the fish-bowl sized cocktail glass she carries and looks up.

You walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. An enormous black pyramid is the Luxor Hotel. An Arthurian castle is the Excalibur Hotel. You walk the boulevard in the same way you would any street in Chicago or New York, craning your neck to catch every copied architectural detail. The strip is brilliant and unapologetically derivative. In case there’s any doubt you’re in a theme park, there’s a twelve story high roller coaster winding around the Empire State Building. It’s no wonder that the artfully bizarre Cirque du Soleil finds a permanent home in Las Vegas for not one, but seven of its shows.

The Bellagio Hotel is my own favourite eye candy. On the half hour, a pond the size of a football field at the front of this great hotel morphs into a stage for a chorus of dancing water sprays. Choreographed against the big hits of Elton John, Sarah Brightman and others, the computer controlled geysers shoot across the pool, a hundred individual jets launch their load successively exploding eight stories into the air. The bigness of it all is breathtaking. Pedestrians pause to enjoy the ten minute show along the elegant stone balustrade overlooking the pool, or from higher up on the sky bridge that conveniently crosses the boulevard at that point.

The brilliance of Bellagio’s water art outside the building is matched on the inside by the dazzling ceiling art of its reception hall. Dozens of brightly coloured, back-lit blown glass poppies are suspended from the palatial ceiling. Each flower, the size of a car tire stretches downward, a garden growing in reverse. Alice would feel right at home in this inverted urban wonderland.

Las Vegas has indeed taken me by surprise. Perhaps I’ve been asleep over the last thirty years. So if I’ve learned one thing from an impulse week-long trip last year, it’s that, what I don’t know about Las Vegas can crash this blog. Everyone I know has been to Las Vegas at least once and many have returned several times. I’ve come to Las Vegas late, so this posting isn’t about sharing any secret knowledge. At best, it might stir some distant personal memory, something about experiencing the wonder and delight of beholding Oz for the first time. (by C. Moisse at Maturetraveler.blogspot.com)