The Rough Guide to Las Vegas (Miniguides) [Paperback]

The most user-friendly, up-to-date guide. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The most user-friendly, up-to-date guide (The Daily Telegraph ) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

The most user-friendly, up-to-date guide The Daily Telegraph --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

This handbook to the neon oasis incorporates tips on blackjack and other gaming options to give you the chance to leave Las Vegas without losing the lot. It includes coverage of the area's other sights, from watersports at Lake Mead to the Hoover Dam and the Valley of Fire, plus an account of the Strip's 100 year history.

Greg Ward is an established travel writer and is the author of six other American Rough Guide titles, including the Southwest USA.

NEIGHBORHOODS AND ORIENTATION
It doesn’t take long to come to grips with the physical layout of Las Vegas. Downtown, slightly southeast of the intersection of I-15 and US-95, may stand at the center of an urban sprawl that stretches fifteen miles in all directions, but it’s the legendary Strip, starting two miles south of downtown, where the main action takes place. In fact, by no coincidence at all, the Strip begins at the point where Las Vegas Boulevard leaves the city limits, and casino owners are therefore not liable to city taxes.

The Strip itself consists of the four miles of Las Vegas Boulevard between the Sahara and Mandalay Bay, and thus now reaches as far south as McCarran Airport. Almost every building along the way is a casino, each frantically clamoring for the attention of the tourists who throng the road day and night. For the sake of convenience, it’s often loosely divided into the South Strip, from Mandalay Bay up to the MGM Grand and New York–New York; the Central Strip, which includes Bellagio, Caesars Palace and the Venetian; and the North Strip, from the Stardust to the Sahara.

Whatever you might expect, downtown Las Vegas is not a bustling area where locals go about their business far from the mayhem of the Strip. Instead, it too is utterly dominated by casinos. Its centerpiece, the Fremont Street Experience, is an extraordinary architectural conceit, in which four blocks of its main thoroughfare have been roofed over to give it the feel of a theme park rather than a real city. An unfortunate side effect has been to make the rest of downtown seem even more derelict and menacing than before; it is not an area any visitor should attempt to explore.

In between the Strip and downtown lie two somewhat seedy miles of gas stations, fast-food drive-ins, and wedding chapels, parts of which have been optimistically but pointlessly promoted as the Gateway District.
Being closely paralleled by both the I-15 interstate and the (currently inactive) railroad line, the Strip also serves as the dividing line between east and west Las Vegas. The closest attempt to match the success of the Strip has been along Paradise Road, immediately to the east and home to the Las Vegas Hilton, the Convention Center, the Hard Rock, and several popular restaurants. A large campus to the east of Paradise Road, between Flamingo and Tropicana avenues, houses UNLV – the University of Nevada Las Vegas – whose students tend to hang out on Maryland Parkway, another block east.

Although the area to the west of the Strip is less susceptible to generalization, the Rio and the Palms have encouraged tourists to stray across to the far side of the interstate, and Decatur Boulevard, especially around Sahara Avenue, is a thriving shopping district.
City residents, of course, can distinguish between the demographic profiles of any number of Las Vegas neighborhoods, but tourists spend so little of their time anywhere other than the Strip or downtown that they can remain oblivious. Broadly speaking, the northeast and northwest quadrants of the city are its less affluent areas, while its most fashionable district is Henderson to the southwest – ranked in its own right as one of America’s fastest-growing cities – with the new Summerlin development to the east tipped as a future rival.

CLIMATE AND WHEN TO GO
Las Vegas is at the heart of the hottest, harshest desert in North America, and so receives less than four inches of rain (10cm) per year. Temperatures, however, vary enormously, with daytime maximums averaging over 100°F (38°C) in July and August, and night-time minimums dropping below freezing in December and January. The midsummer heat on the Strip is unbearable, making it impossible to walk any distance during the day, so the ideal months to visit are April, May, September and October. Hotel swimming pools tend to be closed between October and March inclusive.
The city is at its quietest, and room rates are therefore lowest, during the first few weeks of December and the last few weeks of January, and also during June and July, while Christmas and New Year are the busiest periods of all.