Living Las Vegas

At Home in the City of Lights

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Top Vegas Hotels: Bellagio, Luxor, Rio

Roads from the Ashes: An Odyssey in Real Life on the Virtual Frontier, by Megan Edwards

Off-Strip Attractions

Mushroom Clouds over Vegas

People like to watch stuff blow up, and nowhere in the world is there more proof of this fascination than Las Vegas. Hotel implosions — even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 made them politically incorrect — still draw ogling crowds. But they weren’t the first big bangs that lured curious observers to southern Nevada, and they definitely weren’t the largest. That distinction belongs to the mushroom clouds created by atomic bombs detonated in the 1950s at the Nevada Test Site.

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Over the Hump to the Brothels in Pahrump

Prostitution is illegal in Clark County, even though billboards offering “Full Service Ladies Direct to Your Room” suggest otherwise. Those are personal dancers, understand? They come to your hotel room and dance for you. That’s it. Well, okay. You can take them to the movies or out to dinner, but if you thought those billboards were advertising more than a little innocent social interaction, well, you’re just wrong! There’s no prostitution in Las Vegas. Everybody knows that for that sort of thing, you have to go to Pahrump!

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NASCAR’s on Its Way

I’ll admit it up front. I know extremely little about car racing. Even so, I did once drive a VW bug around the Nürburgring in Germany, I’ve watched electric cars race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and I once spent a scary night in an anti-smoking RV at the Marlborough 500. I still don’t know much about NASCAR except that if you live in Las Vegas, you can’t ignore it the weekend of the UAW-DaimlerChrysler 400. NASCAR fever seizes Sin City, and all roads lead only one place: the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

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The Great Indoors

The Silverton is well known to travelers arriving by car from Los Angeles. It’s the first large casino you come to with a genuine Las Vegas address. RVers and truckers know it well, too. The Silverton’s RV park is one of the nicest in the city, and there’s a TA truck strop right across the highway.

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Megawatt Cactus

If you ever had the thought that a city in the desert lacks the ability to look suitably Christamas-y, all you have to do is head to the Ethel M Cactus Garden to find out that you’re very, very wrong. For the eleventh year running, the destination best known for delectable chocolate (another thing you don’t expect to find in a desert) has flipped the switch on a quarter of a million Christmas lights…

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