Three to four days is a good amount of time for Las Vegas. That covers the Strip, downtown and Fremont Street, the Neon Museum and an evening in the Arts District, plus a day out at Red Rock Canyon. A longer stay lets you add Seven Magic Mountains or other desert trips.

Mostly no. The Strip sits outside city limits, in the unincorporated towns of Paradise and Winchester in Clark County. The city of Las Vegas covers downtown, Fremont Street, the Arts District and much of Summerlin. Locals still call the whole valley Las Vegas, and so does the famous welcome sign.

Las Vegas means "the meadows" in Spanish. Travelers on the Old Spanish Trail in 1829 found natural springs here that fed grasses and mesquite trees in the middle of the desert. The name stuck to the green lowlands and later to the railroad town that grew up beside them.