This recession has been a great gift to me because it has stopped the Vegas implosions so that places are as I remember them and what I have discovered is often in the same place again next trip. And I expect that will be the case for a few more years yet as Vegas licks its recession wounds and perhaps even decides that things don't always need to be thrown away, but can be renovated.
However, there was in 2010 an implosion of the buses in Vegas and new creation as well as renovation.
However, there was in 2010 an implosion of the buses in Vegas and new creation as well as renovation.
I suspended my bus blog as it is just too much work to sort out the old from the new, so most of the information on routes there is just totally out of date. And I don't actually know anything anyway.
I am interested in the newer routes that allow luggage and touch somewhere near the strip. The Westcliff and the Centennial Express both do that in different parts of the strip. If I am going to stay downtown, I need to find a fast and easy way to get there from someplace I am staying on the strip and these two routes seem promising. I like the Gold Line Downtown Express or whatever it is called now.
However, what has happened to me is my gambling has morphed into very little VP and lots of live poker and that flips my focus on staying downtown versus staying near the strip where the softer live poker is dealt. Instead of paytables for machine selection, I now have to study players and determine table selection.
Also, some of the best live poker is done after midnight. Well, I go to bed at home usually before 8PM. So that means I need my room near the game, so I can get a good long nap, or actually go to bed at 5PM and get up at midnight or later. I don't want to be riding buses to get to a game at 1am.
So I just don't have or need that much bus experience myself and so have less first hand information to share. I must depend on just what I read, which is very little just now as all this is new to almost everyone.
Then too it is one thing to figure a route based on the schedule and marked stops and another to actually feel comfortable using that route with luggage. l'm sure that grabbing the WAX at Tropicana after a stay at the Oleans (using the 201 to get to the WAX stop) will be one route I'll try and that would be totally comfortable, but I don't know about trying for the Centennial stop up near Flamingo say after a stay at the Koval Super 8. How far will that luggage roll seem and what will it seem like to make such a walk.
The last two trips I have rolled my luggage from the Orleans to the 202 or to Gold Coast and found that a half hour roll in good weather down Arville feels like safe, good exercise.
If I thought that things would stay the way there are now, I'd start trying to gather than information, but I got burned on the last change when prior to my trip I had learned the new route of the Deuce to Palace Station and that loop down LV Blvd. and learned that it did not go downtown and I got blindsided when they switched that all up just before I arrived.
So I don't go until May. By then there could be lots of changes.
I suspect all of us are going to try to find ways to not switch buses at the new BTC just to avoid that inconvenience, and very few of us are walking from there to downtown because the walk is not safe. However, as I read the schedule on the WAX, wither way it stops for less than a minute at the BTC and delivers us at Casino Center or Tropicana or the Airport with no switching of buses, and so provides a good way to stay some time on the strip and sometime downtown and a way to easily get to the airport from Tropicana near LV Blvd. with luggage.
