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."

Forking over about $40 a day and their pride, perfectly healthy tourists are cruising around Las Vegas casinos in transportation intended for the infirm.

"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.

"We're seeing more and more young people just for the fact that the Strip has gotten so big, the hotels are so large," said Marcel Maritz, owner of Active Mobility, a scooter rental company whose inventory also includes wheelchairs, crutches and walkers.

Most of those using the scooters are obese, elderly or disabled. But many are young and seemingly fit.

The number of able-bodied renters has grown in the past few years to represent as much as 5 percent of Maritz's business, he said. The company, which contracts with some casinos, has a fleet of about 300 scooters.

At full throttle the scooters open up to about 5 mph, though crowded sidewalks allow little opportunity for such speeds. They can go anywhere wheelchairs can - elevators, bars, craps tables - but are banned from streets. They come with a quick operating lesson, an instruction booklet, a horn and a basket.

"At first, I figured it was for handicapped people, but then I saw everybody was getting them. I figured I might as well, too," Lezama said.

Las Vegas has other transportation options, although each has its problems. The Strip is regularly clogged with cabs and drive-in tourists. A double-decker bus system, dubbed the Deuce, often gets stuck in the mess. A $650 million monorail with stops at eight casinos has been plagued by poor ridership, perhaps because it runs behind the resorts, well off the Strip and out of sight.

"It's the same principle as parking in a handicap spot," Mike Petillo, 64, a disabled tax accountant who recently visited from New York City.

Several hotel bell desk workers - who handle most of the rental requests from tourists - said they try to discourage people who do not appear to need the scooters from renting. But refusing the self-indulgent is not really an option.

"You can't really discriminate against anybody," said Tom Flynn, owner of Universal Mobility. "We don't require a prescription or an explanation of why they need it."

Michelle Bailey, a slender, apparently healthy 22-year-old, used a scooter to get around a recent pool tournament at the Riviera hotel-casino. "Four-inch heels," she explained with a laugh, pointing to her lipstick-red pumps.

But Troy Burgess, a 21-year-old optician visiting from Detroit, said he considers it "immoral" for an able-bodied person to rent wheels. And not only that, but "you probably wouldn't pick up too many chicks on that scooter."

We’re just east of the middle of the state.

Grab a map of Nevada that’s about the size of 1/2 of letter page.

Stab your finger down on where you think the exact center of the state is. Look to the right of where your finger is: that’s where we are: Diamond Valley. We’re what is called “high desert.” Hot days, cold nights. It isn’t uncommon to have 90F during the day, and 38F at night in early or late summer. In the hottest part of the summer, we get down to only 50F at night. Positively balmy.

Here in Nevada, there are lots of ranches and farms that are rather isolated — much more isolated than folks from back east call “rural.” Some of these ranches are off the grid; they have gensets and pump irrigation water with diesel engines at the wellhead. There are some who have some solar power installations. Some ranchers just get by without. They’re pretty much working the same way they did when Brigham Young sent forth the pioneers in 1849 to nail down land that had water. Those “pioneer” ranches don’t need to pump irrigation water; those early Mormon ranches were located where a stream or spring came out of the base of a mountain and the meadows were naturally irrigated.

There are roads, but you’re probably looking for something black. Most of the roads outside the urban counties in Nevada are packed dirt. They’re maintained by our county road crews twice a year, and you can tool along on them from 40 to 70 MPH, just spiffy.

Their mail? If they’re really isolated, they’ll be forced to drive into a town where their PO box is. They just rent a big PO box, so it can hold a couple weeks’ worth of mail.

Sometimes, they are on a “HCR” - “highway contract route”, where a US Mail contractor drives a route that includes a string of these ranches twice or three times a week. In this case, the boxes will be at the end of a road, or on a centrally located ranch, and neighboring ranches will drive to the collection of boxes. Sometimes neighbors trade off driving to town to get mail. When they get motivated and want to be paid for their fuel, they sign up to become a USPS contractor, the USPS designates the roads they drive as an HCR and there ya go: mail delivery to within 20 miles of your door. Addresses for some of these ranches look like this:

Big Hat Ranch
HCR 63211, Box 11
Austin, NV (zipcode)

The HCR 63211 is the contract #. The “Box” is the box along the route.

Stores? You drive into town. We have one grocery store in town here, but for big shopping, we drive 120 miles up to Elko. These ranchers will appear in town every other week or so. We’ve been in stores 300 miles away and run into neighbors from the next valley over, who are also “in town” shopping. Again, many of these ranches just do without. They’re raising beef, so meat is readily available. Even Angus cows give milk. They raise their own food on many of these ranches, and nail a deer/pronghorn or two come hunting season for variety.

Police department? They’re who shows up to protect the criminals. Rural Nevadans are armed to the teeth. Criminals who are stupid enough to do something out in the boonies here are usually very, very happy to see the sheriff’s deputies show up. It means that a) the deputies end the arguing between the husband and wife which gun from their collection they want to use to shoot the perp, b) the perp realizes he might live and c) the perp has reason to hope his body will be found even if he doesn’t live.

In general, rural Nevadans spend a fair bit of time on the road. The people in cities who advocate nonsense like “drive 55 MPH” are our biggest annoyance, because it takes a long time to get anywhere at 55MPH. City slickers think 55MPG is “high speed.” In general, the speed limits out here are 70 to 75MPH, and if you’re a local, on good terms with law enforcement, they won’t pull you over if you’re under 80 in a 70 zone, 85 in a 75 zone. If you’re under 85 and they pull you over, they might give you a ticket for “wasting natural resources” because the Feds want to see “X” so many tickets issued for speeding per quarter to maintain our highway funding.

Unless of course, you’re in a luxury car with California or Utah plates. Then you’d better keep to the speed limits, because you’re the preferred target vehicles on our roads.

That said, there are neighbors (ie, folks within a 100 mile radius) who I don’t see more than perhaps twice a year — once at the Independence Day parade/party, and once at the auto parts store Christmas party. They’re too busy to get off the ranch all that often.

Whatever you do, never, ever, ever speed through rural Nevada towns, where the limits will always be 25MPH, 15MPH in a school zone. If you do, you can expect to be busted and busted hard for speeding. There are kids, dogs and old ladies in the middle of these towns, and they’re used to having the right of way. If someone who is stopped for speeding through these small towns lips off to the LEO’s... well, Mr. Lippy is in for a long day. There ain’t much crime around here, and the sheriffs departments don’t have a lot to do. They just love people who lip off to cops. Breaks up their day.

As for your outbound flight: what you speak of is the difference between the “low desert” (Vegas) and the “high desert” (where we are). If you look at your map of Nevada, look for a road that runs (roughly) east/west that is US Route 6. South of this road is the low desert, north is the high desert. The road runs mostly at the bottom of the plateau where the high desert begins. If you drive US-6 from Tonopah to Lund, there are places where you can look to your right and see the low desert, and when you look left, you can literally see the sagebrush is a foot to two feet taller, and there are pinyon pine or juniper trees on your left, whereas on your right there is nothing but saltbrush, shade scale, low sagebrush and some very hardy grasses.

Yes, the strip is huge.

I got plenty of exercise just making my way around Ceasar's Palace in April for a National conference. The hotel has 2 huge towers, a pool the size of a football field, a small casino you pass through, plus shops and restaurants, even before you make it from your lobby to the tower televators. Past those, there is a larger casino, more shops, an indoor theater, monster sized dance clubs, then a mall attached to it. All of this, even before you make it outdoors.

It feels like a mini-city, and that's just one of them.

Didn't dine at the all you can eat buffets, mind you; I ate at the restaurants. Outstanding food! Oh, my! Delicious, but not cheap! One restaurant charged a chunk of change for a wedge salad - some lettuce, tomatoes, and dressing. I thought, there is no way these ingredients are worth anything close to that much money, until they brought out a platter that could feed an entire village in Somalia. That salad was a meal all by itself, and I still had some fabulous baked chicken with garlic mashed potatoes, and steam string beans coming!

You figure with all the food available, you could pack on some serious weight; but if you walked around enough, it didn't matter.

If you are a Sopranos fan, there is an episode this season that was taped at Caesar's. It will give you some idea of the size of the place, particularly when Tony is by the pool. They only show a small part of it (there are several other smaller pools surrounding it for private parties), but even that background shot can give you an idea of how massive it is.

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