Nevada   
The Silver State

Motto: All for Our Country

Hotels           Airlines         Rental Cars

Famous for Silver & Entertainment

State bird, mountain bluebird. State flower, sagebrush
State tree, single-leaf piñon.

Most of Nevada is desert, long high plains doted with cattle and sheep, the number one attraction to visit Nevada is to gamble, Reno and Las Vegas offer many casinos, the large casinos of Vegas are unbelievable in size, larger than many towns, offering shows that cost thousands to millions to put on, aquariums with the largest variety of fish you can imagine, swimming pools with sand beaches and waves, Replicas of 1800 towns with cobble stone streets  actually inside casinos so real you feel like putting on a coat , because you cant get over the feeling your outside with sky clouds and all.

The shows in Reno and Vegas, are of all kinds, country music, rock, Jazz, Pop, Rap. Comedians of all kinds, are funny, and the TV shows that are filmed in many casinos, almost all top stars play Vegas at one time or other.

Lake Tahoe is known for movies, horse back riding, but most of all for skiing, Tahoe is also where Some of the world champion pools tournaments are played.

When they Call Reno "the Biggest Little City in the World" they mean it, its full of fun and excitement twenty four hours a day, the first of the major gambling cites in Nevada, it will not loose its  fascination soon. Reno and sparks are only about three miles apart, and are easy to get around in, both filled with large casinos, the oldest and filled with Nevada history.

Shimmering from the desert haze of Nevada like a latter-day El Dorado, Las Vegas is the most dynamic, spectacular city on earth. At the start of the twentieth century, it didn't even exist; at the start of the twenty-first, it's home to well over one million people, with enough newcomers arriving to need a new school every month.

Las Vegas is not like other cities. No city in history has so explicitly valued the needs of visitors above those of its own population. All its growth has been fueled by tourism, but the tourists haven't spoiled the "real" city; there is no real city. Las Vegas doesn't have fascinating little-known neighborhoods, and it's not a place where visitors can go off the beaten track to have more authentic experiences. Instead, the whole thing is completely self-referential; the reason Las Vegas boasts the vast majority of the world's largest hotels is that around thirty-seven million tourists each year come to see the hotels themselves.

Each of these monsters is much more than a mere hotel, and more too than the casino that invariably lies at its core. They're extraordinary places, self-contained fantasylands of high camp and genuine excitement that can stretch as much as a mile from end to end. Each holds its own flamboyant permutation of showrooms and swimming pools, luxurious guest quarters and restaurants, high-tech rides and attractions.

The casinos want you to gamble, and they'll do almost anything to lure you in; thus the huge moving walkways that pluck you from the Strip sidewalk, almost against your will, and sweep you into places like Caesars Palace . Once you're inside, on the other hand, the last thing they want is for you to leave. Whatever you came in for, you won't be able to do it without crisscrossing the casino floor innumerable times; as for finding your way out, that can be virtually impossible. The action keeps going day and night, and in this windowless - and clock-free - environment you rapidly lose track of which is which.

"Little emphasis is placed on the gambling clubs No cheap and easily parodied slogans have been adopted to publicize Las Vegas, no attempt has been made to introduce pseudo-romantic architectural themes or to give artificial glamour or gaiety."
- WPA Guidebook to Nevada, 1940

Las Vegas never dares to rest on its laurels, so the basic concept of the Strip casino has been endlessly refined since the Western-themed resorts and ranches of the 1940s. In the 1950s and 1960s, when most visitors arrived by car , the casinos presented themselves as lush tropical oases at the end of the long desert drive. Once air travel took over, Las Vegas opted for Disneyesque fantasy, a process that started in the late 1960s with Caesars Palace and culminated with Excalibur and Luxor in the early 1990s.

These days, after six decades of capitalism run riot, the Strip is locked into a hyperactive craving for thrills and glamour. First-time visitors tend to expect Las Vegas to be a repository of kitsch , but the casino owners are far too canny to be sentimental about the old days. Yes, there are a few Elvis impersonators around, but what characterizes the city far more is its endless quest for novelty . Long before they lose their sparkle, yesterday's showpieces are blasted into rubble, to make way for ever more extravagant replacements. The Disney model has now been discarded in favor of more adult themes, and Las Vegas demands nothing less than entire cities . Replicas of New York, Paris, Monte Carlo and Venice now jostle for space on the Strip.

The customer is king in Las Vegas. What the visitor wants, the city provides. If you come in search of the cheapest destination in America, you'll enjoy paying rock-bottom rates for accommodation and hunting out the best buffet bargains. If it's style and opulence you're after, by contrast, you can dine in the finest restaurants, shop in the most chic stores, and watch world-class entertainment; it'll cost you, but not as much as it would anywhere else. The same guidelines apply to gambling . The Strip giants cater to those who want sophisticated high-roller heavens, where tuxedoed James Bond lookalikes toss insouciant bankrolls onto the roulette tables. Others prefer their casinos to be sinful and seedy, inhabited by hard-bitten heavy-smoking low-lifes; there is no shortage of that type of joint either, especially downtown.

On the face of it, the city is supremely democratic. However you may be dressed, however affluent or otherwise you may appear, you'll be welcomed in its stores, restaurants, and above all its casinos. The one thing you almost certainly won't get, however, is the last laugh ; all that seductive deference comes at a price. It would be nice to imagine that perhaps half of your fellow visitors are skilful gamblers, raking in the profits at the tables, while the other half are losing, but the bottom line is that almost nobody's winning. In the words of Steve Wynn, who built Bellagio and the Mirage , "The only way to make money in a casino is to own one"; according to the latest figures, 85 percent of visitors gamble, and they lose an average of $665 each. On top of that, most swiftly come to see that virtually any other activity works out cheaper than gambling, so end up spending their money on all sorts of other things as well. What's so clever about Las Vegas is that it makes absolutely certain that you have such a good time that you don't mind losing a bit of money along the way; that's why they don't even call it "gambling" anymore, but "gaming."

Finally, while Las Vegas has certainly cleaned up its act since the early days of Mob domination, there's little truth in the notion that it's become a family destination. In fact, for kids, it's doesn't begin to compare to somewhere like Orlando. Several casinos have added theme parks or fun rides to fill those odd nongambling moments, but only ten percent of visitors bring children, and the crowds that cluster around the exploding volcanoes and pirate battles along the Strip remain almost exclusively adult.

Neighborhoods and orientation
It doesn't take long to come to grips with the physical layout of Las Vegas. Downtown , slightly southeast of the intersection of I-15 and US-95, may stand at the center of an urban sprawl that stretches fifteen miles in all directions

If you don't make it to Las Vegas, you can get a feel for the nonstop, neon-lit gambler's lifestyle by stopping in RENO , on I-80, very near the California border. "The biggest little city in the world," as it likes to call itself, is a somewhat downmarket version of the glitz and glamour of Vegas, with miles of gleaming slot machines and poker tables, surrounded by tacky wedding chapels and quickie divorce courts. While the town itself may not be much to look at, its setting - at the foot of the snowcapped Sierra Nevada , with the Truckee River winding through the center - is superb.

There are three things to do in Reno: gamble, get married and get divorced. The casinos are concentrated in the downtown area, along Virginia Street either side of the railroad tracks. To get married , the requirements are the same as in Las Vegas, though here you obtain your marriage license at the Washoe County Court , Virginia and Court St (daily 8am-midnight; tel 775/328-3275). Wedding chapels all around the city will help you tie the knot; across the street from the courthouse, the Starlight Chapel - "No Waiting, Just Drive In

Much of the wealth on which Carson City - and indeed San Francisco - was built came from the silver mines of the Comstock Lode , a solid seam of pure silver discovered underneath Mount Hamilton, fourteen miles east of Carson City off US-50, in 1859. Raucous VIRGINIA CITY grew up on the steep slopes above the mines, and a young writer named Samuel Clemens made his way here from the east with his older brother, the acting Secretary to the Governor of the Nevada Territory, to see what all the fuss was about. His descriptions of the wild life of the mining camp, and of the desperately hard work men put in to get at the valuable ore, were published years later under his pseudonym, Mark Twain . Though Twain also spent some time in the Gold Rush towns of California's Mother Lode, on the other side of the Sierra - which by then were all but abandoned - his tales of Virginia City life, collected in Roughing It , form a hilarious eyewitness account of the hard-drinking life of the frontier miners. There's not much to Virginia City nowadays, since all the old storefronts have been taken over by hot-dog vendors and tacky souvenir stands, but the surrounding landscape of arid mountains still feels remote and undisturbed.

US-395 heads south from Reno along the jagged spires of the High Sierra , past Mono Lake, Mount Whitney and Death Valley . Just thirty miles south of Reno, CARSON CITY , state capital of Nevada, is small by comparison but has a number of elegant buildings, some excellent historical museums and a handful of world-weary casinos.

Carson City was named after frontier explorer Kit Carson in 1858, and is still redolent with Wild West history. A good introduction is the Nevada State Museum at 600 N Carson St (daily 8.30am-4.30pm; $3). Housed in the former Carson Mint, it covers the geology and natural history of the Great Basin desert, from prehistoric times up through the heyday of the 1860s, when the silver mines of the nearby Comstock Lode were at their peak. Amid the many guns and artifacts is the reconstructed Ghost Town , from which a tunnel allows entry down into a full-scale model of an underground mine .

Taho is located just 42 miles from Reno on the California border, the lake offers, fishing, Skiing, Horse rideing and Gambling. The Pondrosa Ranch is where the TV searies was shot, its located in  California on the shores of Lake Tahoe.