Last year I went to Las Vegas for the first time since childhood for a work conference, and we decided to wring every piece of interestingness we could out of the place. I'd heard a while ago that the Star Trek attraction had closed a year or two before the reboot movie came out - unlucky timing, with new fans sometimes grumbling about how they missed out on the chance to visit the spectacular cheesiness.
I wanted to see photos of what it had been like, so I did some Flickr searching and ended up finding a few clues that parts of the themed bar were still there, stripped of Star Trek trademarks but not destroyed. We had to visit it.
It's possibly even more wonderful now that it's been forgotten for a few years - it's creepily empty with many remnants of the old decorations, including a former warp core, handmade astronaut suits with spray-painted greebles, great 90s-style scifi walls, glowing lights set in the floor, etc. It's like being in a TV set, in a semi-abandoned spaceship, and in a Las Vegas casino all at once - pretty good amusement for anybody who read Baudrillard in college and still starts expounding about simulacra and hyperreality when confronted with a theme park.
