4 Best Sights in Las Vegas, Nevada

Consider this Downtown museum the afterlife for old neon signs. The facility, which displays more than 150 signs that date back to the 1930s, opened to the public in 2012. The old La Concha motel's historic lobby was renovated and now serves as the museum's entry point. The sign collection includes the original signs from the Stardust, Horseshoe, and other properties. To get up close, visitors must take an educational and informative one-hour guided tour. Daytime tours, especially in summer, can be scorching. For an alternative, try one of the nighttime tours, where you can see four of the signs illuminated the way they were intended to be. In 2018 the museum added Brilliant!, a separate experience in the North Gallery where a laser-light show set to music appears to reanimate some of the signs. The result is, well, illuminating.

Revel in the fabulousness of Lizzo and Missy Elliott, stand toe-to-toe with Muhammad Ali, or croon a tune with Drake or Nicki Minaj as you explore the open showroom filled with uncanny celebrity wax portrayals of people from the worlds of show business, sports, politics, and everywhere in between. Among the new attractions is the Marvel Universe 4-D film in which you can actually feel (as well as watch and hear) your heroes save the world. Crowd-pleasers include Steve Aoki, Snoop Dog, Captain America, Dwayne Johnson, and Miley Cyrus. Hit the bar at The Hangover Experience to immerse yourself in a storied Las Vegas romp and enjoy a cocktail while you're at it.

Today's Las Vegas is lighted by neon and LED, but during the Cold War, uranium and plutonium illuminated the area from time to time as well in the form of a roiling mushroom cloud in the distance. This museum, in association with the Smithsonian, commemorates southern Nevada's long and fascinating history of nuclear weapons research and testing with film footage and photographs of mushroom clouds; testimonials; and artifacts (including a deactivated bomb, twisted chunks of steel, and bomb-testing machinery from the Nevada Test Site). The museum also pays homage to the sometimes frightening, sometimes comical treatment of "the bomb" in pop culture, and occasionally hosts guest speakers and special events.

The museum has virtual tours of the 1,375-square-mile Nevada National Security Site (larger than the state of Rhode Island) and is the starting point for occasional group tours of the area, which used to be the spot in the desert where the government tested atomic bombs. The site is 65 miles northwest of Downtown. There are plenty of restrictions, and live tours book as much as a year ahead, with museum donors getting first pass.

"Fat Mike" Burkett of NOFX is behind this two-story, 12,000 square-foot tribute and repository of in-your-face rock. The artifacts come to life if you opt for guided tours from a rotating list of veteran punks, representing bands such as Bad Religion, The Vandals, and Less Than Jake. In true Las Vegas tradition, there's also a wedding chapel and a bar called The Triple Down (a spin-off of the punk-enough Double Down near the UNLV campus).