traveldk.com

Settle down on a sofa to watch the gold dripping from the jet set. Soothe your envy with piano music from the caviar bar, Petrossian, and the marvelous artistry of the ceiling.

This Old West theme park, which is 45 minutes west of the Strip, may lack the slickness typical of others in Las Vegas, but its rough-and-ready charm usually wins the children over. Among the best features are staged gunfights, stagecoach rides, a zoo, and stores with merchandise from the days of yore.

It’s worth including Boulder City on a Hoover Dam trip to appreciate the scale of work involved – the city was built as a model community to house dam construction workers. The grandest buildings are the Bureau of Reclamation and the Bureau of Power and Light; the Municipal Building; and the Boulder Dam Hotel. Most of the construction, however, was focused on the two- and three-room houses for the workers. (see Construction Workers’ Houses, Boulder City)

Built in 1933, the Dutch Colonial-style Boulder Dam Hotel now houses the Boulder City/Hoover Dam Museum. Actor Boris Karloff and other Hollywood stars stayed in the hotel’s glory days, and Crown Prince Olav and Princess Martha of Norway hosted a party here in 1939. The out-of-town hotel declined in the postwar rise of Las Vegas as a tourist mecca, but, since the mid-90s, a group of volunteers has set about rehabilitating it. The museum itself includes memorabilia from the 1930s.

View from Hoover Dam Visitor Center

When Caesars Palace opened in 1966, no one had ever seen anything quite like it. The grounds, studded with Roman-style statuary, were – and still are – enchanting.