Super Casino Inside the "New" Las Vegas

Las Vegas Bound! Within minutes after the Delta flight lifts off from the Salt Lake City airport runway, the passenger in seat 22B lowers the plastic tray in front of him and opens a deck of cards. "Blackjack?" he asks the woman next to him. "Just for fun. Might as well get started early!" She lowers her tray as he begins to deal. "It's our first time," a honeymooner two rows back confides to the airline attendant taking drink orders. "My husband wants to play poker, but me, I'm going right for the slots. Do you know of any good places to eat?" "The all-you-can-eat buffet at the Rio is the best!" the man sitting across the aisle volunteers. "You really need to see the white tigers at the Mirage!" offers another. "Don't play any of the slots at the airport," a nearby passenger warns. "They're the tightest in town!" The flight attendant, whose badge identifies her as Jasmine, explains that passengers en route to Las Vegas are usually a talkative bunch. "It's like when we have a Super Bowl flight and everyone shows up with their faces painted, hooting and hollering. We've had people trying to shoot craps down the aisles on these flights. At least when we are flying into Las Vegas, everyone is happy." "I see it!" a boy announces less than an hour later. In the distance, Las Vegas appears in miniature, as if its Strip hotels are pieces on a Monopoly game board. It is a city that sprouts unexpectedly in a dead valley, encircled by gray mountains with slag surfaces of stone and gravel. After a flight over cracked riverbeds, wind-burned gulches, and the scorching, moonlike surface of the Mojave Desert, Las Vegas is splashes of color. From the air, green golf fairways come into focus, along with the intense blue shapes of resort and backyard swimming pools. As the plane descends there's more: black asphalt parking lots, gray concrete driveways, brown-necked palm trees, the red tile roofs of Spanish-style houses ringed by privacy walls made of pink adobe. "Look, look! There they are!" a woman cries as the flight circles McCarran International Airport, at the southern edge of the city. All aboard have a clear view of the world-famous Strip as the woman begins identifying the casinos by name, as if they were friends. "There's Caesars Palace and the Mirage! Can you see the volcano? Oh, look -- there's the Luxor and MGM and New York New York!" Forty-seven percent of the tourists who visit Las Vegas each year arrive by air, making McCarran the tenth busiest airport in the nation. Every day, eighty-four thousand passengers arrive or depart. That's the equivalent of nearly one-tenth of the entire Las Vegas population moving through McCarran in a single day. On most afternoons, air traffic controllers can't keep up. They keep planes circling while waiting for runways to clear. If a traveler was completely ignorant of Las Vegas's history and somehow missed seeing the outlandishly shaped super casinos on its Strip, he might be fooled into thinking as his flight circled the airport that he was about to land in a typical southwestern city. A handful of tall office buildings rise from the downtown area and, much like the rings on a tree stump, the urban sprawl rippling outward reflects how the city has grown and prospered. The farther from the city center, the bigger and newer the houses, until you reach the fringes where shopping malls sit next to planned communities with golf courses, tennis and swim clubs, and cul-de-sacs lined with homes. It could be Phoenix, Albuquerque, or El Paso. But once a traveler enters the McCarran terminal, any notion that Las Vegas might be ordinary is quickly dispelled. The voice from the ceiling speakers telling travelers to stand to the right of the moving walkway is not some computer-generated drone. It's JoEarley, Pete is the author of 'Super Casino Inside the "New" Las Vegas', published 2001 under ISBN 9780553573497 and ISBN 0553573497.