Organized Tours

Just about every hotel in town has a tour desk offering a seemingly infinite number of sightseeing opportunities in and around Las Vegas. You're sure to find a tour company that will take you where you want to go.

Gray Line (tel. 800/634-6579; www.grayline.com) offers a rather comprehensive roster, including the following:

• A pair of 5- to 6-hour city tours (1 day, 1 night), with various itineraries, including visits to Ethel M Chocolates, the Liberace Museum, and the Fremont Street Experience
• Half-day excursions to Hoover Dam and Red Rock Canyon
• A half-day tour to Lake Mead and Hoover Dam
• Several full-day Grand Canyon excursions

Call for details or inquire at your hotel's tour desk, where you'll also find free magazines with coupons for discounts on these tours.

A totally different type of tour is offered by Char Cruze of Creative Adventures (tel. 702/893-2051; www.creativeadventuresltd.net). Char, a charming fourth-generation Las Vegan (she was at the opening of the Flamingo), spent her childhood riding horseback through the mesquite and cottonwoods of the Mojave Desert, discovering magical places you'd never find on your own or on a commercial tour. Char is a lecturer and storyteller as well as a tour guide. She has extensively studied southern Nevada's geology and desert wildlife, its regional history, and its Native American cultures. Her personalized tours, enhanced by fascinating stories about everything from miners to mobsters, visit haunted mines, sacred Paiute grounds, ghost towns, canyons, and ancient petroglyphs. She also has many things to entertain and educate children, and she carries a tote bag full of visual aids, such as a board covered in labeled rocks to better illustrate a lecture on local geology. Char has certain structured tours, but she loves to do individual tours tailored to the group. This is absolutely worth the money -- you are definitely going to get something different than you would on a conventional tour, while Char herself is most accommodating, thoughtful, knowledgeable, and prompt. Char rents transport according to the size of the group and can handle clients with physical disabilities; foreign language translators are also available.

Each tour is customized based on your interests, so pricing varies dramatically, but figure at least $150 for the basics (which are much more than basic), with costs going up from there. It's a good idea to make arrangements with Char prior to leaving home.