How to Have Fun in Las Vegas Without Gambling

Casinos provide lots of free entertainment to lure people to come in and gamble. If you can resist the slot machines and table games, you can have a tremendous time at little or no cost.

Things You'll Need

• Comfortable Shoes
• Sunglasses
• Cameras

Instructions

1. Start your day visiting the Mirage.

2. Go to the Forum shops next door to the Mirage, some of the most expensive retail space in America.

3. Visit the free things to do in Las Vegas listed in the Tips.

4. Remarry your significant other in one of the downtown chapels. For a nominal sum, Elvis will preside over the nuptials.

5. Remember to watch all the people losing their shirts while pumping money into the slot machines or passing it across the tables.

Tips & Warnings

• At the entrance to the Mirage, the white tigers are on display along with a video by their humans, Ziegfried and Roy. The diorama housing them is a large room painted to look like a Kashmiri temple with splashing fountains and a deep blue pool that the tigers swim in. Watch the dolphins cavort in the dolphin tank. It costs $3 for one hour of fun.

• Every hour at the Forum Shops at Caesar's, the ceiling and a series of mechanized statues come alive in a show exhorting you to take part in the bacchanal that is Las Vegas. It's an advertisement for the ride called "The Race for Atlantis." The ride costs $9, and that's worth doing, too.

• The best free things are:

• Masquerade Show in the Sky at the Rio: Every two hours starting at 6 p.m., five floats travel on an overhead track above the casino, while 36 dancers, musicians, stilt walkers and aerialists perform on a stage, or from eight attractions that drop from the sky or two circular lifts that rise from the floor.

• Buccaneer Bay at the entrance to Treasure Island: At 4, 5:30, 7, 8:30, 10 and 11:30 every evening, the British Royal Navy does battle against the pirates in a water show complete with stuntmen, cannons and sinking ships. Get there early.

• The Fremont Street Experience downtown: Every hour on the hour from 8 to midnight, a $70-million-dollar sound and light show takes place above four downtown city blocks.

• New York-New York: This is as close to the Big Apple as you can get without flying East. Everything has been built at one-third scale, and it's absolutely worth a visit.

• Nothing is more fun than taking advantage of all that Vegas has to offer without losing the $469 the average visitor gives to the casinos when gambling.