Our visit to see the Wild Lights exhibit in Palm Desert was great fun, so we were interested in seeing how the Christmas lights off the Las Vegas Strip compared.
The weather in Las Vegas was outstanding and a nice change from what we had been experiencing. We ate lunch one afternoon on the outside patio at Mon Ami Gabi at Paris Las Vegas where we watched humanity walking the Las Vegas Strip.
Of all the characters we saw, I thought the oddest were the parents walking up the street with their children while street showgirls, topless except for pasties, walked down the street. My first thought was this had to be an only-in-Las Vegas thing, but then I remembered the Spring Training ballpark in Arizona that used to have an open-air Hooters out behind center field, so there's that.
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Up the road a bit, the Las Vegas Motor Speedway hosts Glittering Lights. This million light display is a drive-through winter holiday exhibit that goes under the grandstands and then loops around the outside of the race track itself. |
| Entry Gate to Glittering Lights |
Since the raceway also hosts the western version of the Electric Daisy Carnival, they should keep at least one of the light tunnels around until then.
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I suspect a lot of people were visiting for other reasons. The "M" in Ethel M stands for Mars and the company was started by the son while estranged from his father. Ethel M is best known for its premium chocolates and especially the liqueur-filled ones. The factory and retail outlet usually have standard business hours but factory tours and retail sales continue during the evening viewing hours of the Christmas season and there were long lines for the tour and the cash registers.
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| Scenes from the Cactus Garden |
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We made a morning visit to Red Rock Canyon, a sandstone canyon on the western fringe of Las Vegas. It was a convenient place to hide stolen horses in the 19th century and to abandon stolen automobiles in the 20th. Today, it's best known for hiking trails and its single sandstone outcropping stained by rusted iron oxides like the Sedona formations.
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| Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area |
Las Vegas is known for "wildlife" of a different sort, but bighorn sheep and wild burros are fairly common. Red Rock Canyon is also home to the desert tortoise, but we didn't see any. We always see wild burros on our drive down US-95 once we descend into the desert outside Tonopah, but it was in Red Rock Canyon that we got to see them up close.
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| This guy didn't move as I approached. The rest started moving away at various speeds |
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| Spring Mountain Ranch House - Sandstone Original and Red Addition |
This alone makes for a good Las Vegas story, but there's more.
After Vera Krupp died in 1967, Howard Hughes bought the ranch, but, for $307,000, Richard Burton bought the diamond ring and it became known as the Elizabeth Taylor-Krupp Diamond.
Taylor claimed it was her favorite piece of jewelry and she wore it quite often, even in some films she made. (This diamond ring shouldn't be confused with the million dollar Taylor-Burton diamond purchased by Burton in 1969 which she had set in a necklace since it was too large as a ring. Taylor thought that diamond was more trouble than it was worth and sold the necklace during her lifetime.)
After Taylor's death, the Taylor-Krupp diamond ring was sold to a South Korean conglomerate for $89.3 million, but with a finishing touch worthy of Las Vegas, experts agree they overpaid.
For more photos, go to: Christmas 2018
