Tag: travel

  • Downtown Las Vegas street art: Fremont Street and the Arts District

    Street art may not come to mind when you think of Las Vegas. That’s fair, I thought the same thing. Are there even opportunities for street art in Las Vegas? The brief answer is yes: Las Vegas has top notch street art. Better yet it’s all within walking distance if you’re staying downtown. Downtown Las…

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  • Review: Omega Mart (no spoilers)

      By now you’ve probably seen ads for something called “Omega Mart,” beckoning you to a specific address in Las Vegas. If you’ve read this far, I bet you’ve already visited the Omega Mart website and learned it’s part of something called Dramcorp. After visiting Omega Mart three times last week I thought I’d provide…

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  • Wink World at Area 15

      After checking into Wink World and putting on a pair of (optional) 3D glasses, I was told to make my way past a series of psychedelic 3D framed paintings to the end of the hallway. From there, a series of small rooms with funhouse mirrors and wacky objects illuminated by blacklights and other whimsical…

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  • The Neon Museum, aka the Boneyard

    For a city with as much history as Las Vegas, you hardly ever see it. Almost nothing on the strip is older than about 30 years. Even downtown the older buildings have had their facades replaced so many times you often can’t tell the difference between a 10 year old building and a 90 year…

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  • The Mob Museum

    Located in an old courthouse building in Downtown Las Vegas, The Mob Museum tells the story of the mafia in America. It’s a story that most Americans are at least somewhat familiar with, but how often do you learn about it in a museum setting rather than from a secondhand story in a movie? After…

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  • Review: Penn & Teller’s new 2021 Las Vegas show at the Rio

      I’m spending this week in Las Vegas — I’ll get to exactly why I chose to visit Las Vegas later on, but this is my first trip of any kind in over two years. (Yes, I know there’s still a pandemic going on but I’m vaccinated and Las Vegas has a perfectly reasonable mask…

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  • Sacramento wrap up and stray observations

    My entire reason for visiting Sacramento was to make up for skipping it on my “Ameritrip” last year in which I traveled by rail from Chicago back home to San Francisco, stopping in a few cities along the way — Omaha, Denver, Salt Lake City, and Reno. Originally I’d planned to make Sacramento a stop…

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  • Sacramento street art

    Like a lot of cities with abandoned buildings and big blank walls facing unused lots, in recent years Sacramento has turned to street art to make the city more inviting and these walls less prone to graffiti. The difference between Sacramento and most cities however is that it has a much larger hole to climb…

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  • R Street food tour from Local Roots

    When it comes to food we’re pretty spoiled in California, with fresh produce from local farms, seafood, and of course plenty of wine to go along with it. So I was a little miffed when all the restaurants were booked well in advance when I arrived in Sacramento on Friday, and were so massively understaffed…

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  • California State Capitol tour

    Visiting the state capitol for the tour, I was immediately surprised by two things: one, the front of the building is largely covered up by scaffolding for a restoration project, and two, you can’t even enter through the original building at all. The entrance is not only in the back “annex” of the building where…

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