Hiking the Las Vegas Strip and other Labor Day adventures

Oh, I love having a day off! I haven’t walked the Strip in ages; like most locals, I try to avoid it. It's funny, I rarely go to the Strip, but I like knowing it's there. Plus, you can never get lost driving around town because you can always see it as your reference point.

Yesterday morning I was in the mood for some urban hiking and there I was, on the Strip by 8:15, before it got too hot (we’re still hovering around 100 here). I parked in New York New York, and headed north from there. As (almost) always, it was a beautiful sunny day.


As you can see, there’s still a lot of work to be done at City Center.



I know that’s supposed to be an amazing place (opening in December), but I have to wonder if it’ll meet its expectations and what kind of impact it will have on the other properties. Vegas is already hurting; I was in New York New York a couple of weeks ago on a Tuesday evening and it looked like a Twilight Zone episode, it was so empty. It was hard to tell if the Strip had a busy Labor Day weekend; there were a few people are out, but it was still early, so who knows.

Here’s some typical Las Vegas trash. You mean tourists actually throw those little cards away?


Whenever I see those ads, I think somebody’s mother must be so proud. I remember when Courtney was about 8 years old, she waved the JC Penney ads from the Sunday paper in front of my face, open to pictures of women modeling bras and underwear. “You couldn’t pay me a hundred dollars to do that!” she cried. From then on, I knew that was one thing I’d never have to worry about.

This is what the Flamingo looks like these days. Can you believe these two are still around?


Have you seen Donny on TV lately? Dude, easy on the Botox!

I had yet to check out the Palazzo, so I made that my destination. I wasn’t that impressed, really.


It’s nice, it’s okay, it’s fine… but to me there’s no place like the Wynn. I love the colors in the Wynn, and the fact that everyone can enjoy the beauty of all these places; people can walk in the lap of luxury no matter what their own checkbooks look like. I didn’t make it up to the Wynn yesterday, though; after I went through the Palazzo, I headed south again.

At a quarter to ten, I stopped at the race and sports book in Planet Hollywood and bet a couple of exactas on the first race at Saratoga, which my sister and her husband were watching in person. This is the first year in a while that I haven’t been able to get to Saratoga, but I’ll be there next year, for sure. No luck on the exactas, and only the VIPs get their own personal TV monitor in Planet Hollywood’s race and sports book, so points off for them.

I made it back to New York New York in time for the second race. No luck on that exacta, either. By then I was pretty hungry—I just got up, threw a baseball cap on, put on some lipstick (duh), and left without eating breakfast—so I had a delicious big-ass piece of greasy New York style pizza in the Greenwich Village section of the casino. Yum!


I was back home by noon, and headed straight for the pool. There were a couple of 25-year-olds lying around in bikinis who made me think maybe that big-ass pizza wasn’t the best idea and that I should really pop in an exercise video when I get back up to my apartment. Then I thought, “Jesus, Linda, you’re comparing yourself to 25-year-olds,” which is all I needed to talk myself out of doing Buns of Steel on my day off.

After I had enough of floating around the pool reading Artie Lange’s memoir, Too Fat to Fish, which by the way is very funny and well written, I made a dent in my freelance work and then went to the movies. I almost saw Taking Woodstock, starring the beautiful Courtney Blackwell Rice as an extra playing a recorder on a porch (yep, she was spared the cutting room floor). Now see—when she went to the casting call, the casting people asked her if she’d do a topless scene, and she said, “Hell, no!” Totally consistent with her stance on modeling underwear.

Anyway, I figured the Woodstock movie would be around for a while, so I opted to see Adam, an independent film that could be gone in no time. It was a worthy effort, nothing great. Afterward I came home, made myself a big-ass plate of ravioli, worked a little more on my freelance stuff and then met Hurricane Mikey for an end-of-a-great-long-weekend Guinness.

When I lived back East, I used to dread Labor Day weekend. Summer was over, and I knew what was coming--in a short time I’d be whining about being so goddamn cold and the whining wouldn’t stop for about six months. I’ve been living in Las Vegas for over six years now, and I still have to pinch myself sometimes—it’s just a great place to live. There are only two things I don’t like about it—the job market is one—and I miss my kids and grandson like you wouldn’t believe. But man, this place is the tits. No pun intended.

How about you? Did you have a fun weekend?

Would you ever consider moving to Las Vegas? If you live here, do you like it?