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You want a good breakfast on The Strip? Go to the breakfast buffet at The Paris. Excellent food, including eggs benedict (my favorite breakfast) for $16 a head, all you can eat.
Want a good dinner? Go to Nine Fine Irishmen in New York, New York. Excellent, traditional Irish food at a very reasonable price. Guinness, Harp, and Smithwick’s on tap. I had the chicken pot pie. It was just like mama used to make...lousy! No! Actually, it was delicious and hearty, filled with generous hunks of chicken and veggies in a thick gravy and covered with a light and flakey crust. Excellent.
Want a great steak dinner? Avoid the pretentious and mediocre Gallagher’s Steakhouse in New York, New York, where the meat is hanging up in the window for all to see, and the average, A LA CART price for a steak is $35! Go to The Outback Steakhouse (Yeah. That’s right - THAT Outback Steakhouse!) which is right next door to the M & M store on The Strip. You can get a GREAT 14 oz. New York Strip done PERFECTLY, along with potato and veggies, for $21.95.
We went to the "Old Vegas" one night. That is where the Rat Pack(You know, Frank, Dino, Peter and Sammy) and Liberace and Wayne Newton used to hang out. A few of the old casinos are there – The Golden Nugget, The Flamingo, The Frontier. Old Vegas (what the locals call "Downtown" is grittier than the new strip. Mustier. The casinos are right next to each other. So you can from walk from casino to casino with a drink in your hands in just a couple of seconds.
It’s cheaper there too. A sirloin steak dinner in Tony Roma’s goes for $19.00.
Fremont Street is fun. It is a pedestrian walkway that is covered with the largest video screen in the world. (The screen is over a half mile in length.) Every half hour, there is a five-minute show that covers the entire length of the street over your head.
The People there seemed to be having more fun than on the new Strip. The place reminded me a lot of Bourbon Street in New Orleans or Beale Street in Memphis…without the great music. The atmosphere was rowdy, raucous, full of fun.
The casinos there were more lively and active than the new ones.
The people seemed to be a less pretentious. Rather than being there to put on airs and to "be styling", they were there to drink, gamble and have a little dirty fun.
I appreciated this Vegas much more than the New Vegas.
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Two great T-shirts out here:
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- "Saw it. Wanted it. Threw a fit. Got it!"
- "If a man speaks in the desert where no woman can hear, is he still wrong?"
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When Bugsy Siegel first saw the patch of land that was to become Sin City, he saw a desert. That it. Badlands, desert, rocks, gulches and canyons. Today, if you travel just twenty miles northwest of The Strip, you’ll find the same thing. Las Vegas is surrounded by desert.
The greatest "shows" in the area are not to be seen in Vegas, but out there in those badlands.
Red Rock Canyon is nineteen miles out of Vegas. If you follow Charleston Blvd. West for about a half hour, you’ll come to it. It costs $5.00 per car to enter, and then you travel on a closed, one-way strip of pavement for thirteen miles.
There serenity, the peacefulness and the grandeur will take your breath away. As you ride or walk or bike along, you find yourself humbled by the spectacle that is Nature. You realize that man, with all of his concrete and electricity and glitz, could never even come close to duplicating.
If you go in the opposite direction out of Vegas and head East on Route 15 for 41 miles, you’ll come to another absolutely incredible natural phenomenon called The Valley of Fire. When you leave Route 15, you drive across badlands for 18 miles, and you swear that you are about to fall off the edge of the earth. Then, you come to the park entrance.
If these natural sandstone sculptures and mountains don’t make your jaw drop open in wonder, then you are not alive. Magnificent red and orange mountains erupt out of the ground for fifteen miles, and, at the end of the drive, you will feel small, insignificant, and awestruck at the beauty and power and patience of nature.
As you drive along, you realize that you looking at millions of years of work by Mother Nature. (The entire valley at one time was the bottom of shallow, warm sea, as is evidenced by coral fossils in the rocks.)
The power of water! Absolutely astounding!
Pictures of The Valley of Fire and Red Rock Canyon will be posted shortly.
After seeing all of this wonder, I found myself wondering, WHY WOULD SOMEBODY COME OUT TO THE DESERT, SEE THIS BEAUTY, AND THEN DECIDE TO RUIN IT WITH PAVEMENT AND CONCRETE? WHAT THE HELL WAS WRONG WITH BUGSY SIEGEL?
You wrote TWO long articles on a city that... well, has good food, has an interesting history, and is built in the middle of nowhere. They also use up all of the energy we need in California by having all those lights on day and night. 
