Seeing the city of lights from a different perspective. This was the goal on yet another jaunt down to the City of Sin for another wedding-related event, this time a 25-minute show at Graceland Chapel.
Vegas is an interesting place; there’s so much to detest but so much to love at the same time. In a way represents America well, what I consider to be, complete free reign for capitalism to manifest in whatever so happens to please tourists.
Unlike previous trips for nightmarish bachelor parties, this one was going to be different by design.
Instead of yardstick sugar booze blends, I was sticking largely to water, and instead of blowing my hard-earned money on 10 minutes of entertainment in a casino, I was instead going to see what this Cookies brand was all about.
Read on to see how what began as a very narrow set of goals and, honestly, a pretty low bar morphed into a wonderful and wild experience.
The Setup: Circa Brings New Vintage to Fremont
Goodbye overpriced strip with overpriced food, and hello downtown with its vintage hotels, casinos, and plethora of regularly priced food!
If I were ballin’ hard of course, a suite in one of the big boys would be amazing, but if you’re not rich and looking to stretch your dollar, downtown is the place to do it.
“But I don’t want to stay in a crappy hotel,” you may protest. Well, first off, not everything that is older is necessarily crappy. Secondly, the Circa Hotel & Casino on Fremont is pretty much brand new and lovely.
We had some friends staying in the Golden Nugget, and it sounded like they could do with a spruce-up. Things like plugged shower drains, for example, can pretty much make or break a trip because there’s nothing worse than standing in dirty bathwater with god knows what floating out of a plugged drain.
Circa was all-around lovely. The restaurants were fantastic. The “Pan-Asian” 8 East was a particular treat. I highly recommend the brisket fried rice. The Wise Man cocktail is also a great way to shed those airport travel stresses and fully settle into “Vegas mode.”
For waking and baking or hangover-curing breakfast, you have Saginaws Delicatessen with a meat and carb-dense breakfast menu to satisfy whatever hankering you’ve worked up. Jack Pots Cafe will serve you up some surprisingly decent coffee to keep you going.
The whole theme of Circa is golden-era vintage Vegas which is very well executed, particularly with the choice of carpet colors and perforated brass-looking metal light shades.
On the roof of the casino area is a maaaaaassive pool area called Stadium Swim. It’s super wide with plenty of spaced-out seating, so you’re not crammed next to people. Dozens of pools make for easy cooling, and the bar up front was efficient and quick.
Oh, and the kicker? Circa is a 21+ establishment, meaning you guessed it, no screaming kids running around spoiling all the adult-oriented fun.
On the whole, this hotel gets a solid 8/10 score, and we’ll definitely be back again.
What’s keeping it from a 10/10, you may ask? Well, there’s a “resort fee” that they charge when you check in, which SHOULD just be wrapped into their publicly advertised nightly rate. Unexpected fees just kind of put a damper on what is an otherwise very exciting first in-person impression…
Second, and less annoying to us at least, was a giant roof leak that ended up flooding part of the sports betting area. We actually got caught out eating dinner in that monsoon and walked back in it, so we didn’t notice the leaking roof but saw it on the news the next day.
Honestly, if it’s just a couple of nights, you’ll probably be fine with most of the Fremont area hotels, and you get immediate access to so many more enjoyable experiences than the main strip. If you crave tourist scenes and big buildings, the strip is a short air-conditioned bus ride away.
Las Vegas Dispensaries Worth Visiting
This write-up isn’t intended to be a be-all-end-all guide to every single dispensary in the Las Vegas area proper. Instead, it’s designed to share a viable path for adventure, getting high, and enjoying food, all in a relatively short period of time and on a normal-sized budget (aka you work a regular 9-5).
Dispensary Stop #1: NuWu Cannabis Marketplace
The NuWu dispensary near Fremont is definitely deserving of its “marketplace” nomenclature because this is a dispensary on steroids.
NuWu is short for Nuwuvi, also known as the “Southern Paiute Peoples,” making this a native peoples dispensary.
If you’re a tourist enjoying the Nevada landscape, you owe it to yourself and the locals to support by NuWu, not that you should need any convincing once you peruse their mind-blowing selection.
Billed as one of the largest dispensaries in Vegas and the country at that (only eclipsed now by Planet 13), there’s something for every type of stoner here.
Coming from Oregon, it was exciting to see many of the brands that are so popular in places like California available here in Nevada. From a massive selection of very fairly priced pre-rolls to endless shelves of gummies and other edibles, this is quite a shopping experience.
What’s more, there is also an indoor tasting lounge (the only one in the state at the time of writing) where you can try some flower, rent an e-rig, or sip on an infused cocktail in the cool, comfortable air conditioning.
I definitely plan to return here and hit up the lounge as experimenting with extracts, for example, is an expensive proposition on your own (rigs, extracts, torches, etc.).
If you’re in a hurry, no worries; there’s also a 24/7 drive-through where you can top up on whatever you need from the biggest and best names in the country.
We ended up walking there from Circa, which in the heat was honestly a bit of a hike as a Las Vegas “block” can be quite large. Next time we’ll probably Uber it so we can get shlitzed in the lounge and ride back to starfish at Stadium Swim.
*That and the walk between Circa and NuWu is along some of the most fecal and urine-smelling sidewalks I’ve traversed, and that’s from a guy who has been all over Portland on foot. Just take an Uber
The Island Sweet Skunk 3-pack we got was intense AF which was made abundantly clear, struggling to walk down the length of Fremont Street without tripping over ourselves or the performers. Island Sweet Skunk is a long-standing popular strain with Canadian sativa lovers.
Not going to lie; it was an intense high. If you’re not a regular sativa smoker, then be prepared for a pretty intense head high.
The smell and flavor of these pre-rolls weren’t anything to write home about, but I’d love to smell some freshly cured flower sometime in the future because the Sweet Pink Grapefruit x Skunk #1 lineage sounds nasally invigorating.
Luckily we also nabbed a tin of Kiva Camino 2:6MG THC/CBD “Social” gummies which we popped like candies through the rest of the trip, which seemed to help even out the spiky peaks from the in-your-face Island Sweet Skunk.
Dispensary Stop #2: Cookies on the Strip
Before your inner hater starts mouthing off, let me say two things:
- Some things can be both popular and good at the same time; they are not always mutually exclusive terms.
- Branding is branding, but at the end of the day, the Cookies Fam produces some exceptionally high-quality cannabis by partnering with solid local growers (at least in my admittedly limited experience)
Like many of you, I used to be a bit of a Cookie hater. Part of it was my general disdain for rich kid L.A. hype vlogger culture, and part of it was just a mild distrust of the brand, given how many celebrities have been shamelessly trading their name for corporate cannabis cash grabs in the last few years.
In many ways, Cookies are the prime representation of Los Angeles’s cannabis culture. Its branding is so slick it looks almost Disney-esque. Check. Rap scene buy-in? Check. High prices and premium positioning? Indeed.
But just like Johnny Walker Blue Label and Ferrari, sometimes the hype is part and parcel with the product. So, if you’ve been sleeping on Cookies because your inner anti-conformist is running the show, you need to give that guy/gal a day off and just indulge a little bit, for the sake of experimentation at least!
Cookies on the Strip is located between the main strip with all the big hotels and downtown where Circa is located.
The walk from Circa to Cookies is a bit long, especially in the heat. Thankfully we discovered the bus line that runs between the strip and downtown pretty dang frequently.
If you’re looking to stay close to Cookies, then The Strat is the closest hotel/casino. No worries if you’re elsewhere, though; the bus line is great, and nothing is far by Uber/Lyft.
The experience was very hype. Bright, loud exterior design. Beautiful displays inside. They had these little containers for the flower display that seem well-intentioned (clear plastic bubble for inspection and some vent holes you can open with a twist), but they were so old the plastic wasn’t clear anymore, and the vent holes smelled more like tourist fingers than dank.
Overall the vibe wasn’t very welcoming, and everyone looked unhappy working there, which was weird. With ever-increasing competition, dispensaries would do well to spend a bit of time on optimizing their retail experience from both the customer and employee perspective.
So expectations weren’t super high initially, especially since in Oregon, it’s common to be invited to stick your whole face in a giant jar to do your “smell testing” pre-purchase.
On recommendation, we got a pre-roll of The Emerald Cut and a pre-roll of Pancakes because sweet strains and bread-heavy strains are some of my favorites.
We couldn’t buy more because we only had a day left, and on top of the two Cookies strains, we still had some of that Sweet Island Skunk from NuWu to crush before flying out.
The Pancakes strain was smoked first. The smell was very sweet, particularly sweet for a pre-roll, which usually doesn’t contain the freshest flower in the world.
Pancake syrup would be the best way to describe that, but not the real kind, the fake stuff, as it doesn’t smell much like maple, just very sweet.
Thankfully the flavor followed the smell directly; no false advertising here with one smell and a different flavor.
This turned out to be one of the most aptly named strains I’ve tried. Bravo Cookies and Seed Junkie Genetics, I’m a Pancakes fan!
Inhaling, exhaling, even in the dry AF Nevada July air coughing was not to be had. No harshness or scratchiness, just a very smooth, very pleasant chill high. This is the type of calm indica dominant hybrid my mind and body needed after a first day of intense lights and intense sativas.
So if you’re not into the branding, that’s fine; the genetics here at play with crossing London Pound Cake with Kush Mints are simply to die for.
But wait….there’s more!
The second pre-roll that was recommended by the budtender was The Emerald Cut, a strain I hadn’t heard of prior to visiting.
Another great collaboration, this time with The MINNTZ, this bad boy’s terpenes were off the chart, with the two dominant terpenes, Terpinolene and BetaMyrcene, coming in at 8mg/g and 7.7mg/g, respectively.
The smell and flavor are an interesting combination with a distinct gassiness that makes you think it’s going to be an intense ride before smoking it and then a very tempered cool mouthfeel when inhaling and exhaling that kind of puts a smooth silvery veneer over the all-around polished smoking experience.
The Emerald Cut was one of the most confusing (in a good way) experiences I’ve had in a while. The Emerald Cut is a great name, no doubt, but this could have also easily been called Icy Hot or Dry Ice or something because of how fresh the flavor is, keeping the gas under control.
Ultimately pre-rolls can only tell you so much. For me to make up my mind and form a long-lasting opinion, I need to see, smell, and smoke at least a quarter ounce to become familiarized with the nuances of any given strain.
I look forward to visiting both NuWu Marketplace and Cookies again in the future and highly recommend both of them to any stoners visiting Vegas and looking for some a quality high.
If you are brand new to smoking, then I recommend NuWu over Cookies, as the NuWu crew was very friendly, very patient, and seemed happy to talk.
At the Cookies on the Strip location, everyone had a frown and looked less than pleased to be working there, which was odd given how great the weed turned out to be. Still, we were in and out pretty quickly, so can’t complain too much.
7 Things to See and Do While High
Once equipped with our supplies, it was then a matter of figuring out what to do WHILE high. Below is a list of activities, not necessarily in chronological order, that I’d recommend considering if you’re planning on getting blazed in Las Vegas:
1. Chill at a pool and get your oasis vibe on
As mentioned, Circa has a fantastic pool that is big enough to prevent crowding and has plenty of seating, especially when compared to other downtown hotel pools. The fact that the entire establishment is 21+ also means no screaming kids running around to ruin your high.
2. Visit the vintage shops in the Arts District
The Arts District sits between downtown and the strip and is a really cool area full of murals, cafes, and vintage shops. If you like antiques, there are some really cool pieces there, which I suppose makes sense, given Las Vegas’ history of showmanship, celebrity, and glam.
3. Visit Letty’s de Leticia’s Cocina at 807 S Main Street
Munchies are an inevitable part of smoking most good weed. To avail oneself of such ailments, I highly HIGHly recommend Letty’s on Main.
The building is cute as hell, the paintings inside are original, the staff very friendly, and the food, well, let’s just say after a couple of quesa birria tacos and a soul-satisfyingly dense torta your case of the munchies will be cured.
4. Have your mind blown on Fremont Street
Fremont is insane, entirely sober, and during the daytime. It’s absolute lunacy at night. It’s yet on another level ripped out of your mind. Caution, though, to sensitive smokers; that shit is fucking INTENSE on the senses and broached on overwhelming initially.
I recommend waiting for the blunt of your high to set in before going, and ideally, smoke an indica-leaning strain to keep your mind under control as it is constantly bombarded with beautiful explosions of visual and auditory stimulation.
5. Ride the downtown-strip bus like a king/queen
So we didn’t realize how easy using this bus was until we’d been walking for an hour and a half out in the July sun. For those as small-brained as us, yes, there is actually a bus line that just runs back and forth between the strip and downtown designed for tourists.
Simply download the app and connect payment like every other app on your phone. You have immediate access to an air-conditioned, double-decker bus from which you can ogle down upon the throngs of sunburnt tourists you’ve just managed to escape and ride above.
6. Attend an Elvis wedding
This was actually the impetus for the entire trip, and after actually experiencing it was one of the shining moments. The couple had a genuinely fun time, and this Vegas cliché is so old now that it’s become legit nostalgia.
Don’t have any friends you can convince to go to Vegas? Well, most of these chapels also do vow renewals, so you can be the change you want to see in the world!
7. Stuff your gullet with a classic all-you-can-eat buffet
High-end, low-end, whatever your price range, you can find a buffet to satisfy your wildest dreams. We opted for the more “classical” option in the Garden Court, a short walk from the Circa, which is a gem frozen in time.
Remember buffets when you were a kid where the options made your mind spin and foods were grouped by nationality? Well, prepare to be transported back in time as Garden Court serves up quintessential all-you-can-eat Americana.
Parting Words
I’ll admit, I haven’t always had the best times in Vegas. I’m not a big gambler and hardly get shit-faced anymore. Aside from the wedding, I wasn’t particularly excited about spending time in the town again.
That said, wow, downtown is so much cooler than the strip, in my opinion, as a (very) working-class man unable to partake in the luxuries of Bellagio suites, that is. If I were loaded, of course, I’d try laying in the lap of luxury to see what it’s all about.
But the Circa is new, and felt it. The 21+ atmosphere was more laid back than family-packed places. The music was on point, and goddamn, those elevators are fast! The photos of Stadium Swim online don’t really do it justice; it’s much nicer in person.
Vegas can be cool. Like most cities, even just scratching the surface of its history and storied blocks presents you with unique memories you’ll want to hold onto. Las Vegas isn’t just for professional gamblers and comptroller conventions anymore; it can be a prime stoner tourist destination as well.
On a more somber note, I wanted to also mention that the Arts District is also home to the Healing Garden memorializing those lost in 2017. The outpouring of such grief and love is an intense thing to experience, but I think it’s worth it, not high. This is part of our shared history. People deserve to be remembered.
Commonly Asked Las Vegas Weed Questions
*No, I’m not a lawyer or an official city representative. As such, I’m obligated to recommend you follow all state and local laws regarding cannabis.
Can you smoke outside in Las Vegas?
Legally, technically, no. That said, it’s a tourist town, and there are dispensaries everywhere, and locals are generally pretty easygoing people.
Find places out of the way, isolated from heavy traffic, and just be polite, and you’ll be fine.
Can you smoke cannabis in casinos in Vegas?
No, you cannot consume cannabis in any of the casinos; it’s the law. No, I don’t agree with that law, especially since they allow cigarettes, but hey, I don’t make the rules.
Can you fly with cannabis out of Vegas?
Legally, technically you know the answer to that question is no. Until the federal government legalizes it, airports and states will not be comfortable letting people fly with it. That said, nobody really cares; just keep it in your bag, and you’ll very likely be fine.
Is cannabis legal in Las Vegas in 2022?
Yes, yes, it has been for a while. Scroll and read the rest of this dope review of how you can enjoy the town high.
