Town Square is a 1.5 million square-foot open air shopping mall – excuse me, they prefer to call it a Regional Lifestyle Center – located a couple of miles south of Mandalay Bay on Las Vegas Boulevard. The $750 million complex will feature 150 stores with familiar names like Abercombie & Fitch, Banana Republic, Borders, Old Navy, and of course a Gap and a Victoria’s Secret because apparently it’s some sort of law that every shopping complex has to have one of each.

More than a dozen restaurants will be featured as well including a Claim Jumper, California Pizza Kitchen, and two restaurants (Louis’s and Louis’s Fish Camp) from James Beard Award winning chef Louis Osteen, famed for his low-country southern cuisine.

If shopping and eating aren’t entertaining enough for you, there will also be a 19-screen Rave Motion Pictures theater complex complete with all digital projection, stadium seating, and all of the usual bells and whistles that modern movie-goers seem to demand.

At the heart of it all are two parks, one devoted to children with a tree house in a 42-foot live oak; themed playhouses; a hedge maze; a merry-go-round; and a theater. The other is for grown-ups and has a pavilion for concerts, picnic areas, and more.

Town Square will officially open on Wednesday, November 14 at 10:00am with the ribbon cutting to happen that evening at 6:30pm. It’s worth noting that not every store and restaurant will be opening on opening day, with several of the retailers coming over the next couple of months.

The complex is located near the intersection of the 15 and 215 freeways at 6605 Las Vegas Boulevard South, about two miles south of Mandalay Bay. For more information visit the website at www.townsquarelasvegas.com.

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Question: We read about the new Arrow buses… what do you think of them and have you ridden in them yet?

Answer: I have not ridden in the buses yet but my general opinion is that any transportation option for people to move around Las Vegas is a good one.

To be clear, however, this is not really an additional transportation option – instead it is a rebranding and upgrading of an existing one. The Vegas.com Arrow Shuttle is replacing the old Las Vegas Trolley shuttle bus routes.

The Arrow, for those who are not aware, is the latest innovation from the behemoth Sin City website Vegas.com. Buses and trolleys (which are really just buses that look like trolleys) will be trolling the tourist areas in three separate routes – a Strip loop that runs from Mandalay Bay up to Wynn Las Vegas; a North Strip/Downtown loop that covers the area from just north of Wynn all the way up to Fremont Street and over to the convention center area (including the Las Vegas Hilton); and then a third covering the far south end of Las Vegas Boulevard including the South Point hotel and the big outlet mall among others.

Each bus is outfitted with touch-screen kiosks that will broadcast Vegas information and allow you to buy show tickets, nightclub passes, and more.

The cost is a seemingly steep $10 per person but that is good all day and includes an all-day pass for the Las Vegas monorail as well. While not as cheap as the city’s Deuce buses, it is significantly cheaper than what it’ll cost for you to take cabs everywhere and easier than walking.

For more information or to purchase passes, visit Vegas.com.

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