Things You Didn’t Know About Las Vegas

Las Vegas is a city that’s had an incredibly colorful history. It has been the setting for numerous movies and television shows, and is a go-to destination when people long for wild adventure. Still, there’s much more to Sin City than you may realize. Here’s an assortment of fun and interesting facts about Vegas:

1. If you were to travel to Las Vegas and stay in a different hotel room each night, it would take 288 years for you to get to all of them.
2. When looked at from outer space, the Las Vegas Strip – which, for the most part, is not technically in Las Vegas, but rather the unincorporated township of Paradise, Nev. – is the brightest place on Earth.
3. Las Vegas is home to the nation’s largest bronze sculpture (the lion outside the MGM Grand), tallest freestanding observation tower (the Stratosphere Las Vegas) and largest mechanical neon sign (Vegas Vic, the neon cowboy outside The Pioneer Club).
4. The Tangiers casino – featured in the 1995 film “Casino” as well as the TV series “CSI” – doesn’t actually exist. Nor do any of the other casinos name-checked on the Vegas-set series, including the Palermo, the Four Kings, the Mediterranean and the Rampart.
5. While the Eiffel Tower model outside Paris Las Vegas is half the size of the original (it was going to be a full-scale replica, but had to be shrunk down due to the casino’s proximity to the airport), the sphinx at the Luxor Las Vegas, a re-creation of the Great Sphinx of Giza, is larger than the original.
6. People in Las Vegas consume more than 60,000 pounds of shrimp per day. That’s more than the rest of the country combined.
7. In Las Vegas, there are eight slot machines for every resident.
8. The Mirage’s iconic golden windows get their coloring from real gold dust.
9. Since Las Vegas is in the desert, local water structures – such as fountains and man-made lakes – all use “grey water,” which is water that’s been recycled from sinks, bathtubs and showers.
10. Due to the city’s large Hawaiian community, Las Vegas is informally known as “Hawaii’s 9^th island.”
11. There’s a heavy equipment playground in Las Vegas where people can drive bulldozers for fun.
12. FedEx would likely not be in business if not for its founder’s luck at blackjack. Down to his last $5,000, Frederick W. Smith hit the tables in Las Vegas and turned his initial stake into $32,000 – enough to keep the company afloat and pay an outstanding $24,000 fuel bill.
13. If the Bellagio hotel hosted every resident of Bellagio, Italy, and gave each person his/her own room, there would rooms left over.

To learn more about Las Vegas, visit our website at www.takeagetaway.com. For help planning a trip to Vegas to observe all these fascinating facts for yourself, drop us a line at info@takeagetaway.com.

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