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Surfing the Strip: What we learned on a double-decker bus in Las Vegas

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The Las Vegas Strip seen from a double decker bus during a Big Bus Tour on September 30, 2015.
Photo: Mikayla Whitmore

The Las Vegas Strip seen from a double decker bus during a Big Bus Tour on September 30, 2015.

The bus floats like a giant Cadillac, cruising through the 21st-century American Dreamscape. From its second floor we look everywhere and nowhere. Tiny raindrops pelt us, our courtesy ponchos rippling in the wind. We wonder if the tour guides will say that Bugsy Siegel built the Flamingo, because so many people say he did. They do. It’s a common myth. The double-decker rolls forward.

Riders hop on and hop off. There are 13 stops—19 if you include the Downtown route. We ride all day, up and down and up and down. The bodies on the ground amble past Venice, New York and Paris. We look at them, and they look back, their huge shopping bags telling us where they’ve been. Novelty drink cups are everywhere, and I wonder if tourists think we drink yard-longs at home the same way they ask if we live in hotels.

Big Bus Tour

These Big Bus Tours are motoring around 16 different cities on three continents, all of them owned by the same equities firm. Tourists in Vienna are seeing the Vienna State Opera house. In London, they’re seeing Big Ben. We’re seeing miniatures of cities, dioramas of the world.

I want them to talk about the reality of the Strip—This is how it works, folks; this here chunk of land feeds the whole Valley—because that’s what’s happening here. The smoke and mirrors is our meal ticket whether we work on the Strip or not, and it seems just as intriguing as how much Liberace made when he started at the Riv ($50,000 a week), which we hear on every go-round. Without this 4.2-mile stretch of road and its three-dimensional expanse of fabulous facades and digital advertisements, the suburbs wouldn’t sprawl to the hills. We need it. A community has been built around it.

Our guide tells us that Brad Pitt likes to shop at Crystals, that the lake outside the Bellagio uses water from the well that once serviced the Dunes golf course. He shares that prices are higher inside casinos, and how to order at Dick’s Last Resort.

Questions are welcome, but between all the movies filmed here, celebrities who’ve married or died here, and reality shows taking place here, it’s hard to interrupt, nor would we want to. One question could blow the order of things.

There is no dead air with Nicole, enthusiastic and youthful. She tells us the intersection of Tropicana and the Boulevard has more hotel rooms than any corner in the world—more than 14,000, topping the entire city of San Francisco. This is the one day it rains in Las Vegas, a place that only gets four inches annually. I wonder what the Big Bus Tour guides are talking about in Muscat.

Tourists take photos of the Las Vegas Strip during a double decker bus during a Big Bus Tour on September 30, 2015.

Parked near the corpse of the Riviera (where the buses depart), we stare at the sleeping giant, its symmetry and angles—concrete boxes painted a uniform off-white—an arrangement of shapes that will be imploded. The half-built Fontainebleau hasn’t even had its life yet, and probably won’t.

The bus heads out, past the razed landscape that once held the Stardust and the New Frontier. Elvis played his first Las Vegas gig at the New Frontier, our guide says. The Harley-Davidson store on the Strip’s south end is the largest in the nation. The Walgreens at the Venetian is the nation’s most lucrative. More pedestrians cross the Brooklyn Bridge here than the real one. Every restaurant inside Paris Las Vegas is good.

For $44, we’re getting our money’s worth. The vantage point shields us from the traffic below. We may as well be on a magic carpet.

Casino windows on certain Strip properties are three-stories high to make it seem like hotels are closer for those trekking on foot, one guide tells us. “If you lost as much at poker as I have, you’d understand why the windows don’t open,” says another on a later ride.

The Las Vegas Strip seen from a double decker bus during a Big Bus Tour on September 30, 2015.

Crossing Fremont on Sixth, nothing is said about Emergency Arts, not a word about the Arts District when we buzz through, but they do talk about the Smith Center and the Mob Museum.

Hopping off at Circus Circus, we walk in the sunlight. A tourist photo-bombs us with a cigarette and a smile. He tells us, “Americans are crazy.” We realize our plastic rain ponchos imply we’re European. A bartender inside asks wryly if we’ve just seen Gallagher perform.

Back on the bus we start the loop again: 70 percent of Strip revenue comes from entertainment, which includes shopping and dining. The pink, vintage Cadillac convertible outside the drive-thru wedding chapel is available for rent. Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton exchanged vials of blood when married at the Little Church of the West. The couple behind us is from Egypt.

In the water pond surrounding the Statue of Liberty at New York-New York, a man is bent over picking up change tossed in with wishes. Maybe this is his wish. He wades a good distance. Security doesn’t seem to notice. We watch him until the bus lurches forward across Tropicana, toward the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Sign.

We think about something Nicole said earlier in the day: There are 6,852 rooms inside the MGM Grand. If you had a baby and it stayed in every single room of the hotel consecutively, that kid would be 19 years old by the time it walked out.

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