Go US: It has some of the world's largest hotels and casinos to beat the band. But that's not all Las Vegas has to offer. There's jogging, for example, writes FRANK McNALLY
IN KEEPING WITH its reputation as Sin City, Las Vegas provides the acid test for any New Year's resolution. That promise to go jogging every day is no exception. On the one hand, the weather is much more conducive to running than it is at home. Even in January, Vegas is balmy enough for T-shirt and shorts. The big problem is getting out of your hotel.
Staying in the Palazzo, a new and typically vast development on the city's main strip, I found that the distance between my 43rd-floor suite and the front lobby was a jog in itself. They give you maps of your hotel here, not of the city, and you need them. The distance to the exit isn't the worst thing from a jogger's point of view, though. The worst thing is that you have to pass through the casino en route.
Negotiating the Palazzo's 9,300sq m (100,000sq ft) gaming area in running shorts first thing in the morning is not a comfortable experience. Such is the sense of exposure that you feel an empathy with the waitresses, who are still serving drinks in miniskirts cut halfway up their bottoms. But at least they get to wear tights.
The faces of the few gamblers who have stayed up all night may be at least as pale as your Irish legs. The difference is that they look as if they belong here. You, for the moment, look like the biggest eccentric in town.
Las Vegas is reinventing itself, again, much as it did in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Mob, having helped create the city, was finally forced out. This time the place is being repackaged as an all-round entertainment destination, with gambling only part of the attraction.
In a radical departure, one of the newer hotels even allows residents to get from their rooms to reception without running the gauntlet of the gaming tables: unthinkable once.
But elsewhere the casino remains central to the city's architecture, in every sense. Las Vegas still announces its core business the moment you arrive. There are slot machines even at the airport, forming a guard of honour (and greeting you with one-armed salutes) as you leave the baggage hall.
The big casinos are still a study in humanity. At night, when the floors are full, you could probably run through them naked and nobody would notice – except, of course the ubiquitous security presence, whose chief concern would be whether your behaviour was an attempt to distract the dealers or an elaborate signal in some new card-counting conspiracy organised by maths whizzes from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The customers tend to be fully absorbed by their own dramas, lost, as must be one of the main attractions of gambling, in the moment. They range from slot-machine players – the lumpen proletariat of the casino floor, appearing hypnotised as they sit for hours feeding their multicoloured monsters, which now lack the excitement even of cash payouts – to the poker players: the intelligentsia of gambling, quietly pitting wits against each other in a separate room.
Between these extremes are the roulette and blackjack tables. But most of the atmosphere, or at least the noise, in a Vegas casino comes from craps. To the uninitiated, craps looks incomprehensible. And beyond the initial moves, when you place your chips on either the Pass or the Don't Pass line, the game can by all accounts be complex.
What makes it so popular, not least with the casinos, is the social element. With its rectangular shape and sunken playing surface, the craps table is a cross between a cockfight pit and a miniature football stadium, and the responses it draws from the crowd around it are suitably raucous. The player who throws the dice each time is geed up in advance by all the others, whose chips depend on the outcome, and the result causes cheers and groans.
In such a maelstrom Don't Pass, the sensible but boring bet, is often considered bad form. The excitement of a shared adventure demands recklessness. And the house tends to benefit from such a mood.
The great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky was more of a roulette man. He wrote his novella The Gambler, hastily, to pay off debts from the tables. But he understood the euphoria that grips some people in casinos, with its contradictory sensations of taking control of your life for a few intense moments and, at the same time, of abandoning all responsibility to the dice or the wheel.
After watching some friends lose their modest gambling budget more quickly than you could say "the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky", I decided to pass on trying to experience that euphoria. And when I tell people since that I spent three days in Las Vegas without having a single bet, they tend to consider this behaviour at least as odd as jogging through a casino in shorts.
But you don't have to gamble to enjoy Vegas. The many theatre productions on offer notwithstanding, the city is a show in itself. You could spend three days just walking up and down Las Vegas Boulevard without getting bored. Everything is larger than life, from the buildings to the people.
It's like being on a film set – and by corollary, as you discover while jogging, the rear of each block is like the back of a film set: all vacant lots, and parking, and hotel busways.
One thing it isn't is quiet. I made the mistake one day of trying to read a newspaper outside a cafe on the Strip. But here, as everywhere, there was too much noise to concentrate. A giant screen nearby was playing the same ads over and over in surround sound, including one for Apple featuring a snippet of Chairlift's catchy song Bruises, with the line "I tried to do handstands for you". I must have heard that chorus 795 times during my short stay in Vegas; it's burned forever into my consciousness now.
A short distance up the street, meanwhile, two life-size ships and an all-shouting cast of pirates were delivering one of their four-times-a-day performances in front of the Treasure Island casino. So I soon gave up trying to read the paper, with its doom-laden news, and surrendered myself to what Vegas primarily offers: a holiday from reality.
I could easily have spent two days just exploring the hotel. It was certainly big enough. In fact, the Palazzo is one of two linked hotel-casinos built by the same people and sharing a complex. Its older sister, the Venetian, is one of Vegas's more famous attractions, featuring a scaled-down re-creation of central Venice.
You can take a gondola ride through the building, enjoying the bright-blue Adriatic sky even at night (it's an artificial sky) while the gondolier sings an aria. And, given the size of the place, this is not a bad idea. While attempting to get out of the building I could equally have jogged this way, via the Rialto Bridge and St Mark's Square. But that was even longer, and you still had to pass through the Venetian's casino – 11,000sq m (120,000sq ft) of it – en route.
Between them the Palazzo and the Venetian have 7,000 rooms, the world's largest hotel campus. Vegas being Vegas, however, the ante is always being upped. Even as the recession bites, a gargantuan complex is rising down the road that will add another 12,000 rooms to the strip. In a clever piece of branding, the development is called City Center, and it's big enough to become just that.
Everybody is a performer in Vegas, not least our cowboy- hatted bus driver, whose catchphrase was "Tally-ho, Tally-ho!" and who, learning we were Irish, broke into an Elvis-style version of something roughly approximating Danny Boy. But on top of the casual daily theatre the city offers a bewildering range of professional productions, each more lavish than the next.
If you ever wondered what happened to Donny and Marie Osmond, by the way, they're here. The billboards still speak of their puppy love, although the puppy long since grew up, got old and arthritic, and was humanely put down. By contrast, Donny and Marie are still going strong, and enjoying a two-year run.
If that's not to your taste, and theatrical acrobatics are, Vegas is the place for you. The famed French-Canadian troupe Cirque du Soleil is staging six shows in the city, including its Beatles tribute, Love. We went to see O (a pun on eau), its water-based spectacular at the Bellagio hotel's medieval-style opera house, complete with a five-and-a-half-million litre (one-and-a-half-million gallon) pool on stage.
Essentially a series of aquatic stunts held together by a thin thread of dream-sequence drama, the show may not be to everyone's taste. One of our group was fantasising about throwing an electric heater into the pool by the end. But it is nothing if not spectacular, and the production values redefine the word "lavish".
There's a fleeting scene in O where the pool drains, exposing a school of deep-sea divers, who for a moment twitch and flap, like fish out of water. It's so short, and so incidental to the main action, you could miss it. But the audience laughs, the pool fills again and you realise that six or seven performers had to struggle in and out of wetsuits just for that throwaway joke.
Other cities create shows for existing theatres. Vegas does it in reverse. The hot ticket currently is Jersey Boys, the Broadway hit based on the story of Frankie Valli the Four Seasons. The Palazzo has built a theatre for this show, which, Vegas-style, will run for at least 10 years. Where O redefines lavish, Jersey Boys does the same for slick: its multiple scene changes facilitated by custom-made stage machinery. But one of the most significant details about it is the Broadway-style interval. Until recently, Vegas shows were designed to run a maximum 90 minutes, with no break, lest gamblers be distracted too long from the main business.
So in one sense Jersey Boys represents the future. In another it nods to the past. As blue-collar Italian-Americans from New Jersey, The Four Seasons were never far from the Mob. One of the subplots (finessed slightly in the Vegas version) is guitarist Tommy DeVito's slide into gambling debt, funded by, and eventually the subject of, a final-demand notice from the mafia.
Like the rest of the Palazzo, the Jersey Boys theatre occupies the site close to the old Sands Hotel, strongly associated with the Mob until Howard Hughes bought it in the 1960s. The Sands was also synonymous with another Jersey boy, Frank Sinatra – no stranger to the mafia, either. So there could be few more apt Broadway shows to bring here. Even while reinventing itself, Las Vegas is staying in touch with its roots.
Frank McNally was a guest of Aer Lingus and Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (
www.visitlasvegas.com)
And if you don't want to gamble...
EatOnce a triumph of quantity over quality, Vegas food is up with the best these days. From the excellent Sushi Roku to Boa Steakhouse – both at Caesars Palace – every taste is catered for. The city is one of America's most obese, however: so at Canyon Ranch Grill, in the Palazzo complex, they've taken to counting calories. The three figures after each item on the menu represent calories and fat and fibre percentages. Try the Healthy Elvis grilled peanut- butter-and-banana sandwich for breakfast. It scores 375/9/8 and costs $7 (€5.50).
ShopYou won't find many quirky or eccentric shops in Vegas, unlike Paris or New York. Everything else is here, though. Mall heaven. Or hell.
Take in a showThe good or bad news is that you've missed Céline Dion, whose marathon five-year run in Vegas is at last over. But her fellow French-Canadians Cirque du Soleil are everywhere in the city, with six shows. Bette Midler and Elton John are regular performers at Caesars Palace. And you can also see Donny and Marie Osmond.
Go clubbingThe hot places in Vegas include Lavo, a Roman bathhouse-themed restaurant and nightclub at the Palazzo. There's also Tao, at the Venetian. And then there's the place to be seen: Tryst, at Wynn Hotel, where features include go-go dancers, a large waterfall and a drinks menu with bottles that can cost you more than a night on the roulette table.
See the Strip from the airA helicopter trip over the Strip at night is almost a must. For about $99 (€77) per person, it's an unforgettable experience, although if you've flown into the city after dark you'll already have a good idea why Vegas is one of the brightest spots on Google Earth.
Visit the Grand Canyon and Hoover DamYou can drive from Vegas to the Grand Canyon and back in a day, easily enough, taking in Hoover Dam en route. But the most breathtaking way to see the canyon is, again, via helicopter. For $379 (€295), the likes of Maverick Tours will fly you into it, set you down near one of the picnic tables and allow you time to feed yourself and the cheeky antelope squirrels. When the pilot stops to refuel on the way back, you may even get to have your picture taken, U2-style, with a Joshua tree.
Licence to thrill: how to get hitched the Las Vegas way
GRACELAND IS THE Notre Dame of Las Vegas's many wedding chapels. For one thing, there is its great age. It has occupied the same site for more than 50 years, making it ancient by local standards.
But it's not just antiquity that makes it venerable. As the name suggests, Graceland Wedding Chapel can also boast a link, however tenuous, with Elvis Presley, the man whose spirit presides over Las Vegas, and its wedding chapels in particular, like a patron saint.
Elvis visited here in 1967 when looking for a place to wed Priscilla. He knew immediately that it was too small. And small it is: many of the people who get married in the chapel probably have bigger living rooms. But when the then owners asked if they could call it after him, he agreed and suggested they use the name of his Memphis home.
As befits such a hallowed monument, Graceland is more restrained and orthodox in its wedding celebrations than some of the competition. It does not have a drive-through window, for example. And it closes at night except on days of exceptionally high demand, such as last August 8th – 8/8/08 – when it hosted 127 weddings in 24 hours.
It does, however, have the famous Elvis ceremony, performed by its current owner, and one of best impersonators in the business, Brendan Paul.
Looking like the slim, black-leather-suited Presley of the mid-1960s, Paul told us that his real surname is Duffy. And to prove his ethnic origins, he broke from a rendition of Love Me Tender into a quick chorus, also Elvis-style, of Whiskey in the Jar.
To emphasise how comparatively dignified Graceland is, though, you only have to visit the nearby Little White Chapel, where there really is a drive-through, complete with menu of fast-wedding options, where Britney Spears got married at 4am, or the Viva Las Vegas chapel, which offers bad taste in Gothic proportions.
In the latter we were treated to a sample ceremony during which, dry ice poured from the grotto-like altar to engulf the congregation, accompanied by the strains of Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra. Then the chapel doors swung open and a pink Cadillac drove up the aisle, disgorging another Elvis impersonator.
This one combined the 1950s army haircut with the 1970s midriff, thereby delineating the whole Presley tragedy in one body. But despite such excesses, the chapel can boast the wedding of the campaigning lawyer Erin Brockovich, among others. Which goes to show that it's not just drunken rock stars who get married in Vegas. (Mind you, Liam Gallagher tied the knot at Viva Las Vegas, too).
One of the big attractions of a Vegas wedding, according to Graceland's manager, Brandon Reed, is that it's cheap. His packages start at €349, which includes the licence, limo hire and tips.
And although all weddings can be broadcast live around the world via the internet, the nature of the city also lends itself to a free-and-easy arrangement with invitations. "A lot of people tell their friends: We're getting married in Vegas. If you feel so inclined to join us . . ."
For this and other reasons, weddings seem to the one recession-proof part of the local economy. The rest of Vegas is hurting, Reed says.
But, if anything, the marriage business thrives on bad times. There may be factors in this other than just cost. Reed suspects there is something about hard times that makes couples more willing to commit. In any case, he's seen a significant increase in number since the financial crisis began. So
unless it's because Elvis is singing it, there's no crying in the chapel around here.
Go there
Aer Lingus (www.aerlingus. com) flies to Las Vegas from Dublin and Shannon via New York, in partnership with JetBlue Airways.