ronveenstra.com::The Las Vegas Strip

Here I am, good to go, looking either pissed, drunk, or just piss drunk. (The answer-> D, none of the above.)

There we go, I look happier in that one.

Las Vegas is all about porn. I kid you not. Every street corner has 4 or 5 "newspaper" bins like this, but honey, they ain't newspapers. And once you hit the strip, every third person is trying to force some sort of porn into your hand. Hrm.. One man's heaven is another man's hell, I guess.

Every building on the Stip glowed one color or another. It made taking pictures a lot easier, though I still screwed most of them up. And I've already forgotten which building most of them are (that's why I tried to get their names in most of the shots). Anyway, here I think we've just reached the strip. We decided to walk there, and it was a bit further than I thought it would be... I suppose it didn't help that we started walking the wrong way...

Here's the Polo towers.

They don't do many things in Vegas small, that's for sure. The hotels/casinos are all huge.. just HUGE.

Here's the Monte Carlo. It's actually not this blurry in person.

And the Harley Davidson Cafe. To give you some perspective, that headlight is approximately the size of Rhode Island.

This is the Boardwalk. There was a rollercoaster and a giant clown.

The CVS pharmacy was all neon and jazzy as well. It becomes a trend, you'll see.

This is New York New York. It, too, was huge.

This is the ESPN Zone. It was park of New York, New York, I think.

Here's the Statue of Libery, part of New York New York. Behind you can see Excaliber.

Here's the Rollercoaster at New York New York... And yes, that's Rita Rudner... Las Vegas truely is the home of the washed up comic.

Here's Excaiber. It looked quite impressive.

Here's a closeup of the Excaliber. It's hard to capture just how big these places are. Imagine something big, then make it a lot bigger, and then you have Vegas.

Here's the MGM, and yes, it does indeed say Carrot Top. Better still, he's performing while we're out here. This commercial ran on the MGM giant TV every couple of minutes, and I found it sadly funny every single time.

Seriously... who pays money to see Carrot Top?

here's a shot down the srip from an overpass bridge. Because I'm so skilled, I managed to get the bars right in the middle of the shot.

So I tried, and failed, again. The road is very, very bright. I think you kinda get the idea.

This is a giant lion in front of the MGM.

Here's M & M World and a giant Coke bottle.

Here's the Eiffel Tower, still a ways away.

Okay, we're inside New York New York now. We were going to try to eat at the ESPN Zone, but it was Monday Night, and the football game was on, so there was no way we'd get in. Anyway, I wasn't sure if you were allowed to take pictures, so I was trying to be sneaky: thus the even more crappy image quality.

Here's a giant sports scoreboard, with odds, and scores, and spreads, etc. There were a ton of games/sports on as well.

Another shot at the scoreboard, I wanted once decent shot at the thing, so I just kept clicking, waiting for some bouncer to end me.

Here are a zillion horse races going on at the same time. The one in the lower row, center screens was Northfield Park, which was near my old home in Cleveland.

Here's a better shot at the ESPN Zone sign.

Here's McDonalds, all jazzed up as well.

There were a number of places where you could rent some snazzy cars for the evening. I'm guessing it's expensive.. but still, some of those cars were very nice.

We're nearing the Paris stuff now. The Eiffel Tower was impressive.

Here's another shot of the Harley Davidson Cafe, this time from accross the street.

And this is the Aladdin. There was a noticeable French theme.

They were selling helicopter rides up and down the strip at night, and to the Grand Canyon during the day. It was getting ready to take off here.

This VW van was ultra tiny. It was about the size of a old VW Bug.

Here's the Bellagio, which looked really classy (well, the building did, anyway). We just missed the fountain show, and didn't know when it would go again, so the plan was to see it Tuesday night.

Here's the Arch by the Eiffel Tower. All this stuff looked pretty slick.

And here's the actual Bellagio building. It's huge.

Here's a far off pic of Caesar's Palace. If the other places were huge, this one is mammoth. It honestly took at least 15 minutes to walk past the whole thing... and then we realized it still streched on for a ways ahead of us..