← Misc · 2022–2026

Las Vegas, Again

Seven trips in four years to the same four miles of boulevard, and what changed each time.

I have been to Las Vegas seven times. People usually find this number a little surprising, and the honest answer to "why Vegas so often?" turns out to be short. The luxury hotels are surprisingly affordable, far more than the same standard would be almost anywhere else, and the shows are wonderful. That's really all it is: a city that keeps making a very nice weekend easy to say yes to.

The interesting part is what a repeat visitor gets to see. One trip to Las Vegas shows you a city. Seven trips show you a city changing. Between March 2022 and March 2026 a black dome beside the Venetian sat dark on the skyline, and then switched on and became the most photographed object in town. A blue tower at the north end sat unfinished for well over a decade and then opened. And the same few landmarks (the STRAT, the Venetian's canals, the High Roller, the Bellagio) appear again and again, each time in a different light, in a different season, with a different person or dog beside me. This post walks through the visits in order. Three of them already have posts of their own, so those get a paragraph and a link.

1. March 2022: the bookends

The first visit in the record wasn't really a Vegas trip. Las Vegas was the airport and the bookends of a desert road trip to Death Valley, Horseshoe Bend and Antelope Canyon. In between the canyons there was a morning at the brand-new Resorts World, brunch at the Wynn, David Copperfield at the MGM Grand the night we came in from Death Valley, the STRAT's observation deck at night and a ride on the High Roller on the last afternoon. All of that is told in Death Valley, Vegas & Page. Two photos from that trip didn't make it into that post, and they belong here, because both places come back later.

The High Roller is a 550-foot observation wheel that opened in 2014 behind the LINQ. A full turn takes about half an hour, slow enough that the cabin ahead of you seems to hang still over the city. The STRAT's poster is a good summary of what Vegas is like. The top of an 1,149-foot tower holds thrill rides that dangle you over the edge, a place to jump off it on a wire, two observation decks, a revolving restaurant and, a few floors down, a wedding chapel. I took the elevator to the decks, which is as far as I have ever gone.

2. June 2022: a week on the Strip

Three months later we were back, and this time Las Vegas was the whole point. We drove up I-15 on Monday, June 13th, and stayed at the Palazzo until Friday, five days in the middle of a June week. That is long enough to stop rushing, and long enough to learn the walk between the big resorts by heart. The first evening was spent wandering. At 7:42 pm the atrium on the Venetian side of the boulevard had a giant red "LOVE" planted in a garden under a glass dome. Later, a waterfall garden was lit up in the dark, white lamps shaped like mushrooms leaning over it.

At 10:15 pm we reached the canal outside the Venetian. The resort opened in 1999 on the site of the old Sands, and its front is a pocket-sized Venice. The pink-and-white Doge's Palace, the Campanile and the Rialto Bridge are all reproduced at reduced scale and all lined up along a turquoise canal. At night, floodlit from below, the copy is better than it has any right to be. Gondolas were tied up for the night, and the water glowed green-blue from lamps set into the bottom of the canal.

Fifteen minutes later we were standing in front of Sweet Sin, a dessert shop by the pastry chef Claude Escamilla, with polka-dot walls, bubble-letter signage and a glass counter of macarons, crêpes and cakes. Vegas is good at this sort of place: a shop designed to be photographed first and eaten in second.

The next morning set the pattern for the rest of the week, which was mostly food. Brunch at the Wynn was smoked salmon with capers, cucumber and a bagel on the side, and then, at 1:03 pm, a slice of chocolate cake with more layers than I could count without zooming in. Nobody needs a cake that tall, which is exactly the point.

In the late afternoon we were back inside the Venetian, in the Grand Canal Shoppes. This is the famous part: a second Venice, upstairs and indoors, with an indoor canal, stone bridges, shopfronts dressed as palazzos and a ceiling painted as a blue sky with drifting clouds. The light never changes. It is always about five in the afternoon on a fine day in there, which is disorienting in a pleasant way, and it was in fact five in the afternoon when I took this.

The next daylight photo is the outdoor version of the same idea. At 6:03 pm on Wednesday the real sky was a hard desert blue, and the Rialto Bridge copy and the red-brick Campanile stood up against it on the Strip side of the resort. The original Rialto is a stone bridge over the Grand Canal in Venice, finished in 1591. This one crosses a moving walkway and some palm trees. It is still a nice bridge, and the bell tower behind it is close enough to the real one that it looks right from most angles.

One night we drove north up Las Vegas Boulevard after midnight, toward the old end of town. At 12:40 am the STRAT was lit gold from top to bottom, standing over a row of souvenir shops, liquor stores and a small Ferris-wheel sign. This stretch between the big resorts and downtown is the least glamorous part of the Strip, and at that hour it was nearly empty. It was the same tower I had stood on top of three months earlier, now seen from the street.

The last big dinner of the week was on Thursday, near the Venetian, and it began with a tower of thinly sliced zucchini stacked like a pile of coins, before grilled octopus and lamb chops. That week had plenty of the usual Vegas, too: frozen drinks in absurdly tall plastic cups, brunch at the Bellagio and an afternoon at the fountains. What it did not have, for me, was a casino floor. I turned 21 just after that trip, so for five days in the most famous gambling town on earth I was politely and repeatedly turned away: by casino security at the edge of the carpet, by nightclub doormen, by anyone who checked an ID. The lesson, if there is one, is to plan your big Vegas week for a few weeks later. The food, at least, is what the camera roll remembers best.

On Friday we drove home. At 12:57 pm, south of Jean on I-15, I took a photo out of the car window of a flat, dusty plain with a row of tiny bright dots on the far side. I didn't know what they were then. Looking at it now, after the next visit, I'm fairly sure they are Seven Magic Mountains, seen from the freeway as a smudge of color. It took another ten months before we actually pulled off and walked up to them.

3. April 2023: from the top

The third visit was a short weekend, April 7th to 9th, which was Easter weekend, and once again we drove. We left on Friday evening and were on the Strip by eleven that night. On Saturday, at 10:36 am, the first photo was a view from our room high up in ARIA, over the south-central Strip. The curved, blue-glass Vdara tower filled one side of the frame, with its name in white script near the top. Behind it, the city ran out flat to the mountains. CityCenter, the cluster of glass towers that Vdara belongs to, opened in 2009 and is the most modern-looking part of the Strip. It looks less like a casino resort and more like a business district that happens to have slot machines.

That afternoon we went back up the STRAT, a year after my first visit, this time by daylight. At 2:54 pm the view north and east was all detail that the night hides: parking lots, construction sites, rows of low-rise motels and the blue and red towers of the north Strip. The indoor deck is enclosed by tilted glass, and the window frames show up in half the photos; there is also an outdoor deck with only a railing. It is also the best place in the city to see how much of Las Vegas is simply flat, empty lots waiting for the next big idea.

Two of those big ideas are in the photos, and neither was finished. On the left, past a golf course, sits a huge black dome. That is the Sphere, still dark in April 2023, five months before it opened in September with U2. In the middle stands a tall blue-glass tower, the Fontainebleau. Its construction began in the mid-2000s and stalled after the 2008 crash, and the shell then stood empty on the skyline for more than a decade. It finally opened in December 2023. When I took this photo, both were still waiting for opening day.

That night we saw O, Cirque du Soleil's water show at the Bellagio. Afterwards, at 11:26 pm, the Bellagio fountains were going, with the Eiffel Tower of the Paris hotel lit up across the street.

On Easter Sunday afternoon, driving home, we finally pulled off I-15 at the dots. Seven Magic Mountains is a public artwork by the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, installed in 2016 in the dry lakebed south of the city. It is seven totems of stacked limestone boulders, each about thirty feet tall and painted in fluorescent pinks, yellows, greens and blues. Up close they look like candy, and against the brown desert and the grey mountains they are almost too bright to be real. At 4:24 pm there was a steady procession of visitors walking up the path from the parking lot.

4. September 2023: Adele

The fourth visit was the one built around a ticket. On Labor Day weekend 2023 we drove up I-15 through a storm and a double rainbow to see Adele's residency at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace, rode the High Roller at night and then saw KÀ at the MGM Grand, and on the way home turned off the freeway at Zzyzx. The Sphere was a few weeks from opening. That trip has its own post: Rainbows, Adele and Zzyzx.

5. June 2024: showing my parents

The fifth visit was for my parents. They had come from China to visit me, and before they flew home I wanted to take them somewhere amazing, somewhere that would feel like nowhere else. After three trips of my own, I knew exactly where that was. It was a short visit, two nights, Sunday and Monday, June 9th and 10th, 2024, and we packed it with the thing Las Vegas does best: shows.

We saw O again, Cirque du Soleil's water show at the Bellagio, where acrobats dive into and rise out of a pool that is also the stage, and the floor seems to turn from water to solid ground and back. My wife and my parents also went to see David Copperfield at the MGM Grand, which was really for my dad, who is a big fan. I had a migraine that night and stayed behind; I had seen the show myself in 2022. And we went inside the Sphere for Postcard from Earth, Darren Aronofsky's film made for the venue, which premiered there in October 2023. It was the first time inside the Sphere for all four of us, and the screen wraps up and over your head, which is a hard thing to describe to someone back home and an easy thing to just show them.

Between the shows there was time to look around. My first photo, at 4:18 pm, looks down from a high window of the Palazzo, where we spent the first night, onto the long cream-colored tower of the Venetian, its rooftop pools and the flat city stretching away to the mountains. It is almost exactly the view I would have had from the boulevard two years earlier, turned on its side. When you come to a place often enough, even the high windows start to look familiar.

Just before midnight the Sphere put on its other show, the one outside. The dome that had been dark on the skyline in 2023 was now fully lit. Its exterior, the Exosphere, is covered in roughly 1.2 million LED pucks, and the whole 366-foot ball works as a screen. It was cycling through animations, first a slowly turning faceted jewel and then, at 11:54 pm, a scene in deep blues and violets. From above, with the dark city all around, it looked like a planet that had landed in a parking lot.

The next afternoon we rode the High Roller again, my third time on the wheel in a little over two years. At 1:17 pm the view was the Flamingo's pool garden straight below, the long white Flamingo towers, the big resorts of the central Strip behind them, and the mountains on the horizon. It's the same view as March 2022, just with harder summer light. The view the other way, down onto the LINQ's rooftops, had something new in it.

That something was the Sphere, by daylight. With nothing on its screen, the dome is a dull dark grey, the LED grid only visible up close, and it sits in the landscape like a giant golf ball half sunk into the ground. Seen like this, it's remarkable how much it depends on the dark. At night it is the brightest thing in town. At 1:18 pm on a June afternoon it looked a little shy, a stage set waiting for its cue.

Near the top of the turn the next cabin swung into the frame. The cabins are glass bubbles that hold up to forty people, big enough that they host parties, and from inside one the neighbouring cabin looks oddly like a space capsule parked over the Strip. Behind it at 1:19 pm were the hotel towers of the central Strip, and beyond those the desert.

My last photo of the visit is from 6:28 pm, from our room at Caesars, where we spent the second night, looking down onto Caesars Palace's pool complex, the Garden of the Gods. A domed white temple stands in the middle of a round turquoise pool, with rows of orange loungers around it, and marble horses rear in the foreground. Caesars opened in 1966 and is one of the oldest resorts still standing on the Strip. Nine months earlier, at its Colosseum, we had seen Adele.

6. Labor Day 2025: with Wangcai

Two years after Adele, on Labor Day weekend again, we drove up with a new passenger: our dog, Wangcai, a cream-colored dog who had joined the family earlier that year. We came in after dark on Friday, August 29th. At 8:09 pm the freeway gave the classic arrival view: the whole Strip lit up across the low ground to the east, gold towers, the High Roller ringed in light, and, at the edge of the frame, the Sphere glowing blue.

Dinner was in Chinatown, the long strip of Asian restaurants and malls on Spring Mountain Road just west of the Strip, and one of the most reliable reasons to visit Las Vegas that has nothing to do with casinos. The restaurant was Hunan, and the order was Hunan-style stinky tofu: deep-fried black cubes in red chili oil under a heap of cilantro and scallions, which is not something you find on many menus and which was excellent. It came with rice, a plate of shredded potato and a stir-fry of pork with green chilies.

The best part of this visit was the next morning. A dog needs a walk whatever city it is in, so at 7:39 am, before the heat, Wangcai and I set out along the quiet south end of the Strip. In late August the desert is already warm at that hour, but the light is low and gold, and the boulevard is nearly empty. In the first photo Wangcai stopped to look at the gold towers of Mandalay Bay rising above the freeway. Twenty minutes later we reached its sign.

Mandalay Bay opened in 1999 as the southern anchor of the Strip, and its three-winged gold tower catches the morning sun better than anything else on the boulevard. At 8:10 the façade was glowing above a landscaped rock garden of palms and boulders.

A few minutes up the sidewalk, the next resort came into view across an intersection. It was a black glass pyramid, the Luxor, with the overhead pedestrian bridges of the Strip strung across the road in front of it.

The Luxor opened in 1993, a thirty-story pyramid of dark glass with a beam of light on top that is said to be the strongest in the world. In front of it lies a sphinx, larger than the original at Giza, with a short avenue of smaller sphinxes leading up to the entrance. At eight in the morning, with nobody else around, it looked less like a casino and more like a film set before the crew arrives. Wangcai was much more interested in the patches of grass.

Next door is the Excalibur, which opened in 1990 and still looks exactly like what it is, a hotel tower with a fairy-tale castle stuck to the front, all red and blue pointed turrets. Behind it, across Tropicana Avenue, the skyline of New York-New York appeared, and that's the moment the Strip stops pretending to be one place. In a quarter of an hour, on foot, we went from ancient Egypt to medieval England to Manhattan.

New York-New York opened in 1997 as a collage of a dozen Manhattan towers at roughly a third of their real size, the Empire State and Chrysler buildings among them, with a Statue of Liberty replica in front and a red roller coaster looping in and out of the whole thing. In the morning sun at 8:24, with the coaster track curling past the towers, it looked like a city skyline packed into a souvenir snow globe.

The walk ended at Hershey's Chocolate World on the corner of New York-New York, with two costumed candy statues out front, a Hershey bar and a pink Kiss, waving beside a miniature "Welcome to Las Vegas" sign. By 8:28 the sun was well up and the pavement was starting to warm, so we turned back. It was a little under an hour for four of the Strip's oldest themes. It is also, I think, the best way to see this part of the boulevard: early, empty and on foot, with a dog setting the pace.

In the afternoon we were out on the Strip again. At 4:02 pm, from a pedestrian bridge near New York-New York, the view ran north past the M&M's and Coca-Cola stores to the Eiffel Tower of Paris and Planet Hollywood.

That evening, at 6:49 pm, we were back at New York-New York for Mad Apple, Cirque du Soleil's show there, a love letter to New York City told with acrobatics, comedy and music. The photo shows the theatre before it started, bathed in purple and magenta light, a raised stage under a mirrored ball and rows of seats in the dark. It's a good reminder of the second half of the answer to "why Vegas?". On any given night the city has more good shows playing than most cities get in a season.

By half past eight the round stage was full: an aerialist hanging above the dancers, a yellow cab parked on stage, and then the whole cast out for the bows.

On Sunday afternoon we went north to the Wynn. Its atrium is a garden under glass. That weekend it was hung with spheres made of flowers dangling from real trees, light slanting in through the roof, and at the center sat a large sculpture of a seated animal made of faceted, multicolored polygons hugging a polka-dot ball. I had last been inside the Wynn for brunch in 2022. The flowers had changed completely since then, and the Wynn changes them on purpose, season by season.

Half an hour later we were back in the Venetian, three years after the June 2022 week. This time the photo is from a balcony looking down into a multi-level shopping concourse with escalators, a reflecting pool, beds of red flowers and the shops of the Grand Canal Shoppes. Some places in Vegas get rebuilt every few years. This one looked exactly as I remembered it, painted sky and all.

Around seven we took Wangcai for a walk on the UNLV campus, past the Hospitality Hall of the university's hotel school. At 7:21 pm she sat for a photo in front of the giant red UNLV letters.

Late that night was Bruno Mars, at Dolby Live in Park MGM. There are no photos from inside the show. That week the whole south end of the Strip was advertising him, and the same picture of him with a guitar was on the New York-New York tower at 11:43 pm and on a screen indoors a few minutes later.

The souvenir was a Bruno Mars Live button pack, four round pins with photos of him singing and playing guitar. We came back with two T-shirts as well, and at half past midnight Wangcai inspected them on the bed.

On Labor Day morning the same picture was up on Mandalay Bay's roadside marquee, above the Four Seasons sign.

Before the drive home we stopped at Olé Churros, a churro kiosk at Town Square, off the south end of the Strip. We had already been there at noon the day before. We liked it very much, so we bought churros there twice. The kiosk was decorated with giant painted churros and a little "Welcome to Las Vegas" sign, and the box held loops of churros dusted in cinnamon sugar with three dipping sauces. It was not the most glamorous meal of the seven visits. It may be the one I would most like to repeat.

7. March 2026: a stop on the way home

The most recent visit was barely a visit at all. On the last day of a spring-break loop through the Southwest, Wangcai still along for the ride, we came down I-15 from St. George and stopped on Sunday, March 22nd, at the Bellagio Conservatory and the fountains. That story is in Hoodoos, Earthships and Red Rocks.

Same city, seven times

Lined up in order, the photos tell a story none of the individual trips did. The first time, Las Vegas was a place to land on the way to somewhere else. The second time, it was the destination, and the camera mostly pointed at plates. By the third, I was looking at the skyline from above and noticing what was missing. By the fifth, the black dome I had photographed unfinished was the brightest thing in town, and I was sitting inside it with my parents. And by the sixth, I was walking a dog past a pyramid at eight in the morning, which is not something anybody plans to do the first time they come here.

That is what repetition buys you. The first visit to a place like Las Vegas is all spectacle, and it's easy to stop there and decide you've seen it. But the Strip is not finished. It gets rebuilt all the time, with new domes, new towers, new flowers in the Wynn's atrium and new names on the marquees, while a few old landmarks stay put and give you something to measure the change against. The STRAT and the Venetian's bridge haven't moved. Everything around them has.

And the original answer still holds. The hotels are a treat, the shows are wonderful, and the drive up I-15 is just long enough to feel like going somewhere. I expect there will be an eighth time. I'm curious what will be new.

Built from the photos' timestamps and locations; times are local. Photo locations have been removed from the published images. Map: map data © OpenStreetMap contributors; each marker is a public place that appears in the photos, with the years it appears, and lodging is never marked.

Some photos in this post are my wife's.