Ultra wrote:So if you live in ST. George. You get the best of both worlds. Las vegas is 90 minutes away and and it is undoubtedly an international destination. Las vegas's airport is second only to Chicago in take-offs and landings. If you take into account that Most of the Chicago flights ar connections (people just shuffling through-never actually leaving the airport) you would see that Vegas is even more of a destination than Chicago...Plus, look on any of the "haute coulture" fashion wear. Any company worth its salt will say London, Paris and Las Vegas.
That's true. When I walk out the door of my office building on to Oak Sreet or Michigan Avenue, lots the boutiques do include Las Vegas on their list of locations. But one big difference is that the companies may list a Las Vegas location, but they sure didn't originate there - they were created in places like London, Paris and Tokyo. As far as most of the outside world is concered, Las Vegas is just a big resort and mall - a great place to buy stuff, but not one where people are designing and creating new things or ideas. But as Las Vegas grows away from the strip, I'll bet that will start changing.
On the airport topic, I just did a quick search, and hey! there are direct flights from LAS to FRA (Frankfurt) a whole two times a week! And direct to NRT? Wow! Three times a week! Direct LAS to LHR? none, but there are 4x a week to LGW! Now that's a global hub! (Actually, I am surprised - I assumed that there would be a lot more flights to/from LAS) Yes, a lot (most?) of the people going into ORD and MDW are just changing planes, but the point is that living here, I can fly direct to a ton of places around the world. Not as many as from NY, but certainly more than out of LAS. (LAS may have ORD or MDW beat on direct to domestic locations - I wish there was an easy way to compare them.)
But my bigger point - which of these would you rather see:
http://www.lasvegasartmuseum.org/
or
http://www.artic.edu/aic/
http://www.lasvegasphilharmonic.com/
or
http://www.cso.org/
http://www.lasvegasnevada.gov/Find/parks_facilities.asp
or
http://www.millenniumpark.org/
http://www.liberace.org/museum.html
or
http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/default.html (an amazing 'old school' museum)
?
or
http://www2.oprah.com/index.jhtml
LV does have Chicago beat on musicals, shows and strip clubs. Chicago doesn't have even one Cirque show running, compared with the 42 separate Cirque shows in Vegas!
The Great thing about ST. G. is that its not a suburb of Vegas. Its its own thing.(the actual city of Chicago is small in comparison with its outlying suburbs.
The city itself has a population of about 2.7 mil. The metro area has between 7 and 20 mil, depending on where you draw the boundaries. (The 20 mil includes Milwaukee, Rockford, Kankakee and most of N. Indiana and is more of a 'economics' concept of the metro area, rather than a 'sociological' one). While the city may only be about a third of the total population, it's still the center and hub of the metro area - it wasn't 'gutted' the way, say, Detroit was. Part of the problem of the current demographic trends is that immigrants are starting to bypass the city and move straight to the burbs, difusing their cultural and ecomomic impact.
tomdarch I dare you to drink the water out of the Chicago river
, even with a purifier. but I would drink the water out of the Virgin River (with a purifier, of course! 8) )
Actually, growing up here, I'm sure I've ingested gallons of lake water. I've also eaten a fair amount of fish caught in the lake. While I would be careful about where along the river I pulled the water, I
would drink a small amount of water from the river. (There are areas of the river that were sites of PCB dumping and such - it is fairly messed up.) I wonder if the purifier would even matter - maybe microorganisms cant survive the chemicals?
I'd be a little careful about drinking from the Virgin - Utah has its fair share of problematic mining, chemical and nuclear industrual activities.
So in conclusion St. G. is a better place to live, work and climb than Chicago ever was.
My point was that while St. George may be a better place for
you to live and work, it isn't a better place for everyone. But there is no doubt that it's a better place for climbing than Chicago - by a factor of thousands!
Sorry, Meadows, I'm just enjoying arguing! But seriously, have you considered Salt Lake? It's the least Mormon part of the state (which might be a bad thing if you were counting on some lez booty-luvin'
) It's within driving distance of endless rock, with a pretty hot economy, plus it's one of the best places in the world for skiing/boarding! Too bad it's short on the 'sexual exibitions' criteria