My wife and I are spending my spring break week in Las Vegas, to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. This was her idea, really, but I’m glad she pushed it. I don’t know what every would have gotten me out here, and this is a place I should see. Since I’m a part-time pro magician, and since Vegas is the town where magicians come to “make it,” I should have had the Vegas experience long ago.
We’ve been overwhelmed in our first 18 hours here. Too much to see and experience. We are staying in a Hilton Grand Vacation resort hotel on the Strip, which is really a resort hotel and not a casino place. There’s a lovely pool with a bar downstairs, similar to the place we stayed in Aruba 10 years ago, but there’s no restaurant nor casino.
We have tickets for three shows (Mac King, Lance Burton, and Crazy Horse Paris), but otherwise no specific plans. We reached a point of Strip-fatigue, and our trip had no focus until this morning. Curious about that ugly pile of rubble three lots over from our hotel, we did some investigating and discovered that it is the ruin of the legendary Stardust hotel and casino, one of the first hotels on the Strip.
The Stardust was demolished on March 13 to make way for something called the Echelon. (Thanks to The Strip Podcast for this, plus fantastic video of the demolition.) I am very sorry to have missed seeing that place. It closed last year and is now gone forever.
Further googling and digging led to the Las Vegas Casino Death Watch page, which has a list of hotels in Vegas that are in danger of being converted to huge non-kitschy modern highrises. Now our trip has a focus.
We just agreed that we should be looking at as many of these classic hotels as we can, both on the Strip and downtown. After we see Mac King’s show today, we will take a closer look at Harrah’s, as well as the Riviera and the Sahara.
Pictures will follow. The hotel’s WiFi connection is not fast, but it does seem to work just fine.
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