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! Continue reading »

"Let's take a drive out to wine country." It sounds a lot more like a San Francisco suggestion than something you might hear on the Las Vegas Strip. But the fact is, you can take a drive to a winery from Las Vegas. This excursion is known locally as "going over the hump to Pahrump." Continue reading »

Las Vegas has a well-established reputation as a good place to eat, mostly because cheap, all-you-can-eat casino buffets are a long-standing tradition. More recently, with the advent of big-name chefs and their prestigious restaurants, Las Vegas's reputation has expanded. Continue reading »

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. Continue reading »

Death Valley wins my vote for the best weekend getaway from Las Vegas, especially in the winter. Even though Highway 190, which provides the most direct route into the valley from Pahrump, was washed out last August and is still closed, Death Valley is easily accessible from Las Vegas. From Pahrump, a road leads into the south end of the valley through the town of Shoshone, or you can take Highway 95 north from Las Vegas to Beatty and enter the park from the north. Continue reading »

People who've lived in Las Vegas a long time are always moaning about the traffic. I can't blame them. When a city goes from dusty Western town with a couple of intersecting highways to a multi-freeway metropolis in forty years, it's easy to wax nostalgic for the good old days. I've lived here only five years, and even that is long enough to remember charming phenomena that have vanished in the supergrowth. There's a street named "Pyle" on the south side of town, but recent arrivals don't know that the next major street north of it used to be called "Gomer." "Gomer" is now Silverado Ranch Boulevard. Ah, the good old days, when you could name dirt roads after old sitcom characters. Continue reading »

Since I am working on a novel set in Las Vegas between December 16th and New Year's Day, I decided it would be enlightening to visit the Strip on Christmas. Word around town is that, unlike New Year's Eve, Christmas isn't a big holiday here... Continue reading »