Living Las Vegas

Real Life in the Shadow of the Strip

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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

Chardonnay in the Chaparral

“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.”

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Grocery Shopping in Sin City

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.

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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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Escape to Death Valley

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.

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Driving in Las Vegas

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.

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