Cab fares are going up, the Monorail is failing, the Duece bus is slower than a retarded monkey, gridlock on the Strip make driving impractical …
And it’s 4 frigging miles from one end of the Strip to the other.
So what’s a tourist to do who doesn’t want to hike several miles in 110 degree heat?
Apparently, in greater and greater numbers, they are riding one of these things pictured at left.
Now, I realize that the first inclination is to call these people lazy, but an 8 mile round-trip walk with sweat pouring off of you in a town in which you have only 48 hours to spend, well … it starts to make sense.
How many of you walk 4 miles to run errands at home?
We really, really, really need some sort of reasonable public transit here in Vegas, and until we get it, this thing actually makes some morbid sense.
But that doesn’t stop the Associated Press from calling you guys lazy. Then again, how many people who work for the Associated Press actually waddle their fat asses up and down The Strip in the middle of July?
Somewhere in the neighborhood of zero I would wager.
This is Vegas. We don’t exercise here. Want to exercise? Get a Richard Simmons tape. Fuck the AP. Rent the scooters. I bet it’s a great way to see The Strip.
http://www.dailybreeze.com/news/nationworld/articles/7683537.html
There’s lazy, and then there’s Las Vegas lazy.
In increasing numbers, Las Vegas tourists exhausted by the 4 miles of gluttony laid out before them are getting around on electric “mobility scooters.”
Don’t think trendy Vespa motorbikes. Think updated wheelchair.
Forking over $40 a day and their pride, perfectly healthy tourists are cruising around Las Vegas casinos in transportation intended for the infirm.
You don’t have to take a step. You don’t even have to put your drink down.
“It was all the walking,” 27-year-old Simon Lezama said while seated on his red Merits Pioneer 3. Lezama, a trim and fit-looking restaurant manager from Odessa, Texas, rented it on day three of his five-day vacation, “and now I can drink and drive, be responsible and save my feet.”
The Las Vegas Strip is long past its easily walkable days. Casinos alone are nearly the size of two football fields. That doesn’t count the hotel rooms, shopping malls, spas, convention centers, bars and restaurants.
And that’s just inside. For tourists who plan to stroll from one big casino to another, there are crowds, construction sites and long stretches of sun-baked sidewalks between.
A tourist could accidentally get some exercise.
“We’re seeing more and more young people just for the fact that the Strip has gotten so big, the hotels are so large,” said Marcel Maritz, owner of Active Mobility, a scooter rental company whose inventory also includes wheelchairs, crutches and walkers.
Most of those using the scooters are obese, elderly or disabled. But many are young and seemingly fit.
The number of able-bodied renters has grown in the past few years to represent as much as 5 percent of Maritz’s business, he said. The company, which contracts with some casinos, has a fleet of about 300 scooters.
Yes, that was sarcasm.
