An All-American Road where nothing is from here
A federally designated All-American Road in Nevada whose surfaced places are almost entirely replicas and collections — and whose only native landmark is its newest.
The Las Vegas Strip is an All-American Road. That is the same federal designation the Beartooth Highway carries, and the San Juan Skyway, and Big Sur. People do not believe it until they look it up.
It is also the only corridor in this series that surfaces no lookouts at all. No viewpoints, no parks, no public land. What it has instead is attractions, and reading them in a row is the whole story.
The roster is a list of somewhere else
The places the corridor read marks as on the road itself: the Paris Balloon at 0.01 mi, the Coca-Cola Store at 0.02, an Eiffel Tower at 0.03, the Fountains of Bellagio at 0.07, flamingos at 0.08, indoor skydiving at 0.14, the Pinball Hall of Fame at 0.15, and a shark reef at 0.19.
A tower from Paris, a balloon from Paris, birds from the tropics and a reef from the ocean — arranged along four miles of Nevada desert.
The museums nearby continue it. An Elvis Presley Museum, a Punk Rock Museum, a Hollywood Car Museum, an Erotic Heritage Museum. Four collections of other people's pasts, none of them local, all within three quarters of a mile of the road.
The exception, and its date
One surfaced landmark is actually of this place: the Las Vegas Boulevard Gateway Arches, which carry a build date of 19 November 2020. The single thing on the roster that is unambiguously about Las Vegas is also the newest thing on it.
The tallest is the Stratosphere Tower at 350 m, a quarter mile off the route — and it is a tower with a drop ride and a swing on top, which is to say it is also an attraction rather than a view.
Why it earns the designation anyway
An All-American Road is supposed to be a destination in itself — a road you drive for the road. On that test the Strip qualifies more literally than almost any corridor in the country. Nobody drives it to get anywhere. The driving is the entire point, and what is on either side was built to be looked at from a car.
Every other byway in this series shows you a place. This one shows you a thing that was built to be seen.
The desert is still there underneath it, four miles wide and unlit past the last property line. That is the part the roster does not carry, and the part worth driving out to find once the light stops.