Walking the full length of the Las Vegas Strip — roughly four miles from Mandalay Bay at the south end to the Stratosphere at the north — takes longer than you think and rewards more than you expect, especially if you go on foot rather than by cab.
The Strip is formally Las Vegas Boulevard South, though it runs partly through unincorporated Clark County. The casino hotels that line it range from the architecturally serious — the Bellagio's curved facade, Wynn's bronze glass tower — to the enthusiastically absurd: New York-New York's miniature skyline, The Luxor's pyramid with its skybeam pointing straight up at the stars, Excalibur's fake castle towers. It's a document of what different decades thought entertainment architecture should look like.
The Bellagio fountains are the one element that earns their reputation without any qualification. The 1,200 water shooters choreographed to music — opera, pop, Broadway — create something that's genuinely moving despite being a casino promotional amenity. I've watched them run to "Luck Be a Lady" and to "My Heart Will Go On" and both times found myself more engaged than I planned to be.
The LINQ High Roller, a 550-foot observation wheel near the center of the Strip, gives you the aerial view that explains how the whole thing fits together: a narrow corridor of light in the middle of dark desert, contained and intense. The light visible from space, theoretically. From 550 feet, I believe it.