Traffic on the Strip stinks. The book warned us about it, and still we headed North from the airport anyway. There are four or six or a million lanes in each direction but the packs of cars just lurch from one red light to the next. It took us twenty minutes or so to creep the three miles to mid-strip where we turned around at the Stratosphere. It’s the tallest building West of the Mississippi (dang – almost twice as tall as the Space Needle) and there’s a roller coaster circling the top. Are you out of your mind?

From the South end of the strip it looks like just another exaggerated construction project but from the highway it’s clear that it towers waaay over the rest of the city.

Outside the Luxor we got some insight into the Building of the Pyramids.

These hotel additions run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s stadium money in a normal town.

Yeah, New York New York is the most insane building I’ve seen since the Experience Music Project (Seattle again).

Ninety minutes from New York to Paris

Night time is a fine time to take photos on the strip but my camera battery died on me that first evening. So I’m just going to fill up this space between these two pictures to make sure the layout works. That should do it.

The Rio looms above the highway like Boba Fett’s helmet updated for the late 1980s.