I just saw this great article from The Age about the latest Vegas trend: electric wheelchairs for the able-bodied but lazy:
There’s lazy, and then there’s Las Vegas lazy.
In increasing numbers, Las Vegas tourists exhausted by the four 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 about $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 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.
Yeah, walking around can really tire you out. If you come to Vegas to relax, why should you have to slog for dozens of yards through air-conditioned casinos to get to where you need to go?
I can just imagine the fulfillment that the scooter inventors will get from this development: not only have they given thousands of elderly and infirm people the gift of mobility and independence, but now Strip revelers can get soused without getting busted for DUI or waking up with sore feet.
And as far as the promise of romance goes, I really, really hope that tooling around on a fire engine red scooter is as big a hindrance in hooking up as it should be. I don’t think I could handle seeing parking spaces for scooters in front of Pure, Light, or Tryst.
Interesting aside–I misspelled “Tryst” as “Trust” three times before I got it right. How do you think a nightclub where people lovingly re-affirmed their monogamy would go over? I can see the billboard now: “Trust–you’re together forever.” Unless I’m misjudging the market, it would close faster than La Bete.