Vegas 2026

Jan 1

I woke up at Terminal One in long-term parking sometime before noon. My brother texted to say he was in Vegas and sent the hotel location. There was large-vehicle parking nearby, so I pulled in around one in the afternoon and finally made it to the room. It was New Years Day, and the Rose Bowl between Indiana and Alabama was already underway. We caught up, talked, and watched the game. I’ve been rooting for Indiana ever since they put together a winning season a couple of years ago. They won big, 38 to 3, and Alabama never really looked like they showed up to play. Since the College Football Playoffs began, teams with a first-round bye have never won—Indiana was the lone exception this year.

Fremont Street

We went down to Fremont Street to see how it had changed. I hadn’t been there since nineteen eighty-three, when I moved from Los Angeles to Denver, and even then it already felt like old Las Vegas. This time the changes were obvious. Fremont is no longer just a street lined with casinos and neon. The LED canopy overhead completely alters the experience, turning the street into something more enclosed and theatrical than I remember.

Some things were still familiar. A few of the neon signs triggered real memories. They took me back many years. The Golden Nugget looked largely the same, which helped anchor the walk. But everything around it felt busier and louder.

The crowd itself was part of the show. There were a lot of Indiana fans celebrating in the street. One guy stood out in particular—wearing a bathing suit, no shoes, and plastic decorations hanging around his neck—shouting “we are number one” along with a stream of mostly incoherent sentences. His wife walked beside him, smiling and gently shaking her head, clearly used to the routine. Nearby was another group dressed head-to-toe in Indiana prep clothing, their kids in matching red, making a family event out of it. Indiana red kept popping up all along the street.

Zip lines now run for blocks overhead, carrying people overhead while music and video roll across the ceiling. We spent about two hours walking, mostly watching the ceiling and the crowds, trying to reconcile what I remembered with what Fremont has become.

Dinner at the Golden Nugget

We eventually stopped for dinner inside the Golden Nugget at Claim Jumper. We decided on quality instead of quantity. One restaurant down the street advertised, “Over 350 lbs Eats Free”. The Golden Nugget was a good place to slow down after all the walking and noise. The service was genuinely good, relaxed without feeling inattentive, and the food was well prepared. Sitting there felt like a reset. Fremont Street has clearly changed, but not everything feels unrecognizable. Some pieces are still there if you look for them; they’re just surrounded by a lot more light and a lot more people.

Sharks and Glass

After dinner, we stopped to look at the shark tank. The swimming pool was closed, but we could see the clear tube passing directly through the tank. A man standing beside us quietly identified some of the sharks as they moved past—nurse sharks, hammerheads, sand tiger sharks, and blacktip reef sharks. It was a surprisingly calm moment given everything happening outside. We also spent a few minutes noticing the Chihuly glass installations in the bar areas, which added another layer to the space.

We walked a bit more, but the music on Fremont kept getting louder until the sound was no longer something you heard—it was something you felt. Eventually it crossed a threshold we couldn’t tolerate. We headed back toward the van, parked near the old train station. Even that looked different now, washed in light and far more theatrical than I remembered.

Driving the Strip

We decided to drive toward Caesars and the Bellagio. Along the way we passed Circus Circus, Treasure Island, and the Forum Shops. The LED technology was impressive. Some of the round pillars were completely wrapped in LED panels, thin enough to turn almost any surface into a screen. The advertising alone felt like a moving gallery of light.

Traffic was a mess. We crawled along, entertained by the lights and distracted by one spectacularly bad driver who kept darting from lane to lane in search of an imaginary advantage. He’d cut people off to gain two car lengths, only to lose them again moments later. At one point he nearly hit a couple crossing the street, growing more agitated by the minute. It was hard to understand why he chose that stretch of road at all—there were clearly better ways around—but we had driven into the chaos intentionally, to experience downtown Vegas rather than avoid it.

On the other side, we passed New York–New York, Disneyland, the Pyramid, and the Blue Man Pavilion. Just rolling through and taking it all in was part of the fun. Vegas is a city built to be seen, and even from the car, it delivered.