tl;dr: yes, no, respectively.
I spent two days in Las Vegas, and boy, if you ever thought it was a good idea to go to the desert in June, you were wrong. It was 109 degrees my first day there. Thankfully, it's a dry heat, so my hair looked OK as I passed out from heat exhaustion.
AFFORDABILITY: Flights to/from Vegas are very, very cheap, especially with Spirit Airlines. I was looking at flights to the East Coast from California, and it was like $250 with a 9-hour layover. From Vegas, it's under $100 and direct. Vegas seems to be one of the only places in the US where you can get a cheap hostel dorm bed for under $15 on weekdays. (A quick hostelworld.com search will get you a list of these.) You can also get a Groupon for a swanky hotel on the Strip for what amount to $30-40 per night, if you include all the hidden fees (such as the $15-20 "resort fee" that all of them seem to have). (I couchsurfed, because it is free and a swanky hotel doesn't sound like that much fun alone anyway.) Housing is really cheap here over all (I saw ads for a 4-bedroom house for $750 a month!), so you could probably sublet for cheap if you wanted to stay for an extended period of time.
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| People over 350 pounds eat free at the Heart Attack Grill. I met a French girl outside of this restaurant, and she was basing her perception of America on this place. Gods be merciful. |
However, the best part of Vegas was the cheap Mexican grocery store, Mariana's, and its amazing $1.50 tacos.
FREE HIGHLIGHTS: 1. The world's largest chocolate fountain! This is located in the Bellagio hotel/casino, as part of a fancy (and expensive! A nice-looking dessert will run you $7+) patisserie. It was designed by a world-famous chocolatier. But you can't eat it, which is sad.
2. Free moving statue show and aquarium at Caesar's Palace hotel/casino.
3. The fully-functioning carousel made entirely of flowers at the Wynn hotel/casino.
4. The Kush art gallery at Caesar's. There are actually a lot of outstanding galleries inside the many shopping malls. I fell in love with this world-famous artist's beautiful surrealism.
More free attractions here: http://www.insidervlv.com/freeevents.html (but these were my favorites.)
IN SUMMARY: I'm not a night owl by any stretch of the imagination, so Vegas is not the town for me. However, even if I were, there's something so utterly fake about the touristy parts, and try as I might, I wasn't able to get any real recommendations for non-touristy areas worth visiting. (There was some kind of cool tiny house parking and spray-painted bus thing going on as part of the Downtown Project, which is some kind of revitalization attempt for the non-touristy areas.)
Vegas just isn't...fun. The casino games aren't fun; the shops are basically all the same; the casinos are so massive (each one is like a huge shopping mall + hotel) that it's exhausting to walk around, and ultimately not that rewarding. I've heard that the shows are good, and you can get OK prices on last-minute tickets, but I didn't feel like spending the extra money to see a show in a city that I found utterly fake. I didn't get the feeling that the locals ever go to the Strip, but I couldn't figure out if there are any cool areas that he locals DO go to. Also, it was 109 degrees. All in all, not recommended, unless, like me, you are at the end of a road trip out west and need a cheap place to fly home from.
Fun travel fact: Boltbus and Greyhound have loyalty programs!
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