Forget spending the entire trip on the casino floor. From driverless rides and underground Teslas to psychedelic art, punk dive bars, retro breakfasts and competitive darts, Las Vegas is at its best when things get a little strange.
Las Vegas has never had much interest in subtlety. Yet some of the most enjoyable things we found on our latest trip had little to do with gambling, big-name shows or sitting beside a resort pool.
Instead, we ended up travelling around in a car with no driver, disappearing beneath the city in a Tesla, throwing ourselves into ridiculous games, drinking $2.99 espresso martinis and wandering through rooms filled with mirrors, neon and enough visual trickery to make the Strip suddenly seem restrained.
This is Vegas as playground rather than casino. Some experiences are technologically ambitious, others resolutely old-school. Together they reveal a city that is becoming increasingly interesting away from the familiar blackjack tables and mega-resorts.
Let a robot drive you around Las Vegas
Perhaps the most futuristic way to experience Vegas right now is to climb into a Zoox.
There is no driver’s seat, steering wheel or slightly awkward conversation about how long you are staying in town. Instead, passengers sit facing one another inside a purpose-built autonomous vehicle while the car handles the journey.
Zoox has opened its Las Vegas service to the public, with rides available through its app to selected destinations.
It is transport turned into an attraction. Driving around a city already overflowing with visual distractions while nobody appears to be driving the vehicle adds another layer of surrealism. The novelty inevitably wears off at some point, but during that first journey it is hard not to keep looking for the steering wheel that isn’t there.
Then disappear beneath it in a Tesla
Vegas has another unconventional transport experience hiding beneath the streets. From Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino, you can enter the Vegas Loop, The Boring Company’s growing network of tunnels carrying passengers between destinations in Tesla vehicles.
The Westgate station connects the hotel with the Las Vegas Convention Center and Resorts World, with the wider system continuing to expand. Unlike Zoox, the Teslas still have drivers. The fun here is the environment itself. One minute you are standing outside a giant Vegas hotel, the next you are accelerating through a narrow illuminated tunnel underneath the city.
It may not replace conventional public transport any time soon, but as a piece of Vegas theatre disguised as transportation, it is worth experiencing. As an added bonus; the driver’s soundtracks are a great listen even if it is for just a few seconds you are in the car.
Spend an afternoon behaving like a child at Luxor
There is something wonderfully liberating about discovering that grown adults can become intensely competitive over almost any activity once somebody starts keeping score.
Play Playground at Luxor takes that principle and builds an entire venue around it. Instead of arcade machines, the attraction is filled with large-scale physical and interactive games designed to get groups moving, competing and generally making fools of themselves. It works particularly well with friends because the enjoyment comes as much from watching somebody else’s attempt go disastrously wrong as it does from winning.
We went in expecting to spend an hour and lost an afternoon, mainly because we took far too long trying to master the giant Ringer Run, throwing plastic balls at oversized cacti and attempting not to fall off the Poker Parkour beam. None of it sounded like something we would get quite so invested in, which was probably why we enjoyed it so much.
Lose several hours inside AREA15
AREA15 is where Vegas fully abandons reality. The entertainment district sits around a mile west of the Strip, but psychologically it feels much further away. Inside, you move between monumental art, immersive installations, bars, games and spaces apparently designed specifically to make your phone’s camera roll considerably stranger.
The obvious starting point is Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart, a sprawling alternative supermarket. At first it appears to be a particularly unhinged grocery store stocked with bizarre products. Start opening doors and following passages, however, and the whole thing expands into a maze of installations, hidden rooms and an increasingly peculiar narrative.
You could easily spend hours trying to make sense of it. Not making sense of it is equally enjoyable.
The recently opened Museum of Ice Cream Las Vegas goes in an altogether sweeter direction, with immersive environments, slides, games and the kind of playful interiors designed to make taking photographs almost inevitable.
Then there is Wink World, created by Blue Man Group co-founder Chris Wink. This was the collection of brilliantly weird neon rooms that had us reaching for our cameras constantly. Infinity-mirror spaces combine light, sound, reflection and movement into a short but pleasingly disorientating experience.
If you like photography, immersive art or simply walking into rooms that make you question what you are looking at, AREA15 deserves a substantial chunk of a day rather than a quick stop.
Go drinking in the Arts District
For a very different side of Vegas, head north to the Arts District and spend a few hours walking rather than navigating another casino. This is one of our favourite areas to wander because the scale changes. Main Street has independent bars, breweries, restaurants, vintage shops and creative businesses that make it feel removed from the enclosed mega-resorts further south.
Start with cheap beers at ReBAR before moving to Able Baker Brewing, where the focus shifts towards locally brewed craft beer. Food can come from SoulBelly BBQ nearby, making it an easy stop as part of an afternoon moving around the district.
The pleasure here is not really about ticking off individual venues. Have a beer, walk a little, find somewhere else and repeat. It is one of the easiest ways to experience Las Vegas at street level.
Eat a completely unreasonable breakfast at the Peppermill
Some places survive endless reinventions of Las Vegas because changing them would entirely miss the point. Peppermill Restaurant and Fireside Lounge has been on Las Vegas Boulevard since 1972 and remains an explosion of blue booths, mirrored surfaces, coloured lighting and old-school Vegas excess.
Go for breakfast and arrive hungry. Really hungry. The portions are among the biggest we encountered anywhere in the city and have the enjoyable absurdity of food arriving at the table and immediately prompting the question: who exactly is expected to finish this?
Once you have recovered, walk through to the Fireside Lounge at the back. Built around its famous fire pit, it moves the experience firmly into retro Vegas territory.
We particularly liked the nachos, although after breakfast you might want to leave a few hours between the two.
Find Vegas’s dive bars
Not every drink in Las Vegas needs to arrive beneath a chandelier with a theatrical garnish. Just behind the Strip, Stage Door Casino provides the opposite experience. It makes a convincing case for escaping the resort bars when all you really want is a cheap drink and somewhere without pretence.
Further east, close to Virgin Hotels, Double Down Saloon heads deeper into dive-bar territory. The punk bar has pool, pinball, video poker and regular live shows, with exactly the kind of unpolished atmosphere you want from a proper Vegas dive.
Polished Vegas this isn’t. That is exactly why it works.
Turn darts into a night out
Darts has undergone an unlikely transformation from pub pastime to high-tech group entertainment and Flight Club Las Vegas at The Venetian is a particularly slick example.
Located inside the Grand Canal Shoppes, it combines electronic scoring and multiplayer games with food and cocktails, so you do not need to be remotely competent with a dart to have a good time.
The technology removes all the tedious arithmetic and leaves everybody free to concentrate on the important business of becoming wildly overconfident after one decent throw. We particularly liked the playback screen that showed off our best bits (unfortunately there weren’t too many) and the email that we received a day later that let us replay some of the highlights from our visit.
For groups, it makes an easy alternative to another evening sitting around a casino bar.
Treat happy hour as a competitive sport
Vegas can become expensive with alarming speed, making the hunt for happy hours a useful game in itself.
One of our regular refreshment stops was Favorite Bistro on The LINQ Promenade, where the afternoon happy hour offered discounted drinks alongside food specials. At Chickie’s & Pete’s Crabhouse and Sports Bar inside SAHARA, we also found a particularly good craft beer deal, with selected draught beers discounted during happy hour.
Deals change regularly in Las Vegas, so checking the current offer before setting off is sensible. Finding a genuinely good one, however, remains deeply satisfying.
Drink a $2.99 espresso martini
One deal deserves its own mention. The International Bar inside Westgate serves $2.99 espresso martinis, pre-made by the team and available while they last. Yes, $2.99.
They became one of the unexpected pleasures of our stay. In a city capable of charging serious money for a cocktail, there is something extremely Vegas about discovering an espresso martini for less than the price of a coffee back home.
Go looking for the ghosts of old Vegas
To understand why Las Vegas looks the way it does, visit The Neon Museum Las Vegas. Its outdoor Neon Boneyard gathers signs and fragments from casinos, hotels and businesses that once illuminated the city. Removed from their original buildings, the typography, colours and enormous scale become easier to appreciate as pieces of design.
It is also a reminder of how readily Las Vegas destroys and rebuilds itself. Hotels that once dominated the skyline survive here as lettering, arrows and glowing fragments of another era.
For anyone interested in graphic design, signage or Vegas history, it is one of the city’s most rewarding stops.
Where to stay in Las Vegas
Our three choices each offer a very different version of the city.
For a smaller Strip hotel with plenty of personality, The Vanderpump Hotel is the most distinctive option, combining boutique proportions with the theatrical styling you would expect from a Lisa Vanderpump property.
For space away from Las Vegas Boulevard, Virgin Hotels Las Vegas works well as an off-Strip base on Paradise Road. If you are looking for stylish designed rooms and suites with plenty of space this is for you.
Then there is Westgate. It might not have Vanderpump’s boutique proportions, but its history gives it something increasingly difficult to find in Vegas. The property was formerly the International Hotel, where Elvis Presley began his famous residency in 1969. For anyone looking to track down the ghost of Elvis-era Vegas, Westgate is one of the best places to start. The hotel still leans into its connection with Presley, from memorabilia and the former International Hotel history to live Elvis performances and the chance to see the penthouse suite associated with his time at the property. It adds another layer of nostalgia to a stay that already feels closely tied to Las Vegas history.
Stay there for the nostalgia, have a $2.99 espresso martini and then disappear beneath the building in a Tesla. Few combinations summarise old and new Las Vegas quite as neatly.
The other Las Vegas
The Strip will always provide spectacle on demand, but Vegas becomes considerably more interesting once you start treating the city itself as the attraction.
Ride in a car without a driver. Travel through a neon tunnel. Play games you are far too old to take so seriously. Get lost inside an impossible supermarket. Drink in a punk bar at a ridiculous hour. Eat breakfast beneath pink and blue lights. Then go and look at the giant signs belonging to casinos that no longer exist.
Las Vegas has spent decades reinventing itself. Right now, some of the most fun comes from bouncing between its past and its increasingly strange future.
Words: Kerry Ocoy
What are the best things to do in Las Vegas besides gambling?
For us, some of the most enjoyable alternatives were AREA15, Play Playground, the Neon Museum, the Arts District and simply experiencing the city’s increasingly strange transport options, including Zoox and the Vegas Loop.
Is AREA15 worth visiting?
If you are interested in immersive art, photography and unusual experiences, allow several hours. Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart is the obvious starting point, while Wink World and Museum of Ice Cream offer very different visual experiences in the same complex.
What are some unusual things to do in Las Vegas?
Ride in a driverless Zoox, travel underground through the Vegas Loop, explore Omega Mart, visit old casino signs at the Neon Museum or head away from the Strip for beers in the Arts District.
Where can you experience old-school Las Vegas?
The Peppermill and Fireside Lounge, Westgate, Stage Door and the Neon Museum all preserve very different pieces of Vegas history and character.
