Everyone has a "hometown"...

     It's normally considered your place of birth.  In our case, Dave's was the then-small farming town of Warren in northeast Ohio. Larry's was White Plains, New York...a commuting suburb of NYC.  Nowadays, some folks consider their hometowns to be where they currently live...particularly if they've lived in it for a long, long time. That's OK too!
     Dave recently came up with the amazing deduction that most cities and towns, including hometowns, have a main street and/or an urban area.  It's usually where local commerce is located and where people congregate in large numbers to work, visit and shop.  It's often called "the center of things".
     Yes, we have a "downtown" -- the City of Las Vegas.  However, as most "locals" and visitors know, Greater Las Vegas (aka the sprawling Las Vegas Valley) has its share of crowded streets, bustling neighborhoods and three other incorporated municipalities: Henderson, North Las Vegas and more distant Boulder City, adjacent to Hoover Dam and Lake Mead far to the southeast. 
     We thought it might be fun for us -- and hopefully of interest to you -- if we took a mini-hike (several, in fact) and snapped some special photos of Las Vegas' largest source of revenues along what the world considers to be the Valley's centerpiece magnet.
     So, we cordially invite you to enjoy our pictures of this valley's urban center: the widely known Las Vegas Strip, where gaming and tourism reign supreme as Nevada's #1 revenue source!
      It's certainly home to many businesses and global corporations as well as having constant crowds of patrons -- millions of 'em each month from around our planet!
     As a matter of fact, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, more than a record 41 million visitors came to Las Vegas to Las Vegas in 2014 and it's a safe bet that most, if not all, walked along The Strip (or took a few steps on it for the record).  The Authority is aiming at its next goal of 45 million visitors in the coming years.
     Dave and Larry have walked the entire Strip (on two separate Sunday morning outings in the intense heat of summer) to capture images you see here. It's a unique project that Dave creatively named An Urban Hometown Hike!  Yeah...he really came up with a winner this time!
     You'll find these Strip images at the top of our gallery selections.  We originally planned to take and display artistic pictures of the massive hotel/casino structures that dot both sides of Las Vegas Boulevard (i.e. the Strip), but decided that most folks know what these gaming factories look like, so we decided to focus more on the People of the Strip.  It kinda sets the stage for the rest of the galleries of photos taken by the GetawayGeezers from Las Vegas!
     The friendly folks in this gallery, we feel, add character, personalities and often unique touches of pizzazz, friendliness, loneliness, mystery, excitement, optimism and, yes, even homelessness. The Strip's personality is a composite of its people, pure and simple and we hope we've captured it here.
     Besides honking drivers (taxis and tourists alike), there are walkers, sitters, lookers, families and loners, bikers, babies, gardeners, policemen, sleepers and sweepers, diners, exercisers and a multitude of other little-noticed folks with unique personalities of their own not often captured by a camera.  We took a gamble with this different approach to photographing The Fabulous Strip...and hope you enjoy the results! 

CLICK PICTURE TO ENLARGE