Editorial · Vegas–LA lodging
The 132-Mile Gap
Between Boulder City, Nevada and Yermo, California — about 132 road miles — there is no reliable place to sleep. Plan your night at either end.
Somewhere past Boulder City, the beds run out.
It didn’t used to be this way. For seventy years, the drive between Las Vegas and Los Angeles came with a rhythm: casino towers at one end, motor courts at the other, and a string of roadside beds in between for anyone who ran out of daylight. Primm had three casino hotels stacked right against the state line. Baker had motels older than the interstate itself, parked in the shadow of the World’s Tallest Thermometer.
As of this summer, nearly all of it is gone.
Whiskey Pete’s — the castle on the hill at Primm — closed in December 2024. Buffalo Bill’s, with the roller coaster wrapped around it, opens for events only. Primm Valley Resort sits shuttered mid-transition. Cross into California and it doesn’t improve: Baker’s Wills Fargo Motel closed in 2023, and the Royal Hawaiian — the town’s palm-signed midcentury landmark — was demolished in 2025.
Which means this, and we say it plainly because nobody else does: between Boulder City, Nevada and Yermo, California — about 132 road miles — there is no reliable place to sleep. Gas, yes. A famous thermometer, yes. A bed, no.
So plan your night like it’s 1955 and the desert is still the desert:
Anchor east
Boulder City is the sleeper pick — a town that banned gambling, kept its 1933 bones, and holds the Boulder Dam Hotel, a 22-room Dutch Colonial where dam engineers and film stars once signed the register. Hoover Dam is ten minutes away at sunrise, before the tour buses.
Or push through
The gap is two hours of the emptiest, starriest driving on the route. That’s not a problem to solve. That’s the point of the drive.
Then anchor west
The first dependable bed on the far side sits at Yermo, outside Barstow — and from there Route 66’s motor-court survivors carry you the rest of the way toward LA.
The roadside America that built this corridor is thinning. The towers at both ends will outlive us all, but the middle — the neon, the motor courts, the swimming pools shaped like kidneys — is disappearing one demolition at a time. Drive it while the thermometer’s still standing. And know where your bed is before the sun goes down.
Lodging picture current as of July 2026; Roamward's route pages carry the live version.