Deep inside Area 15 (yes, 15) in Las Vegas is Omega Mart. To the casual observe, it looks like any old grocery store… but looks can be very deceiving.
This commercial from two years ago is one of the more up-front videos about the attraction, but when videos started appearing online in 2021, they were far more cryptic.
For instance, take a look at this old Omega Mart TV ad…
“Local coast to coast” and “your family won’t be the same” seemed … odd.
Even the more modern commercials also show that something is not quite right here.
Nebula loaf?
There were also bizarre product ads, like this one for Shrubs, the avocado-flavored French fry treats.
There are even videos about Plenty Valley and how it came to be at Omega Mart.
I fell down this Omega Mart rabbit hole quite deeply. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of Omega Mart videos. Some are presented as TV ads for the grocery store itself, promoting special deals. Others are for what I assume are “store brand” products. And others are like weird informercials…
The videos were scattered around the internet on YouTube, social media, websites and more, so I expect there are plenty I have yet to see. Fortunately, some folks have collected them and put together compilations of all the videos they have found.
And the rabbit hole went even deeper: There are internal employee training videos! Here are all the sections presented as one long video.
So just what IS Omega Mart?
Beats me! And we spent over five hours exploring it.
Here is my VR walkthrough of a tiny bit of it. In the future, I’ll share some thoughts and explanations.
Area 15 in Las Vegas (not to be confused with Area 51) is an entertainment complex that houses various food, drink, and entertainment offerings. You can ride an indoor zip-line, throw axes, play retro video games, experience Virtual Reality and spend hours exploring Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart.
Here is a VR walk around some of the art displays outside the building:
And here is a VR walk around the inside of the Area 15 building:
Admission to the building itself is free, so you can just go there and look around. Individual attractions and experiences all charge their own fees.
You can buy combo passes to save some money, as well, though I did not check to see how much of a saving this actually is.
First, a quick update to my Miscellaneous (“Other Places”) photo gallery… I found some Las Vegas, Nevada photos I took in 2000 during a work trip. These were taken with my 1996-era Epson PhotoPC digital camera, so the “high resolution” was only 640×480. You can take a glimpse of Vegas through the eyes of a first-generation digital camera here:
Next, Omega Mart has been added to the gallery! After running in to some very weird “commercials” on YouTube for this “grocery store” a few years ago, I went down quite a rabbit hole watching their in-universe videos. Omega Mart is an interactive experience where you can walk through and just look at bizarre artistic creations, OR go down the rabbit hole yourself and explore the underlying story. For this one, Omega Mart is a grocery store operated by a corporation called Dramcorp. Dramcorp is up to some questionable business practices, involving alien worlds, extracting “the source” from humans, and stuff that it would take a book to fully explain. If even possible.
I really wanted to get to Omega Mart, but ended up in Denver earlier this year, and thus my first Meow Wolf experience was their Convergence Station (see photos in the gallery).
It is located inside a facility called Area 15 (15, not 51) which was quite the site on its own—attractions, food, drinks, VR, arcade, shopping and, of course, Omega Mart.
VR photos posted to Park Hopping in VR on Facebook, and VR videos will be on my Park Hopping in VR YouTube channel (currently unlisted, but I will make them available soon—or ask, and I’ll send you the link sooner).
The Disney/MGM Studios was epic at Christmas time when it had the “Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights”, but that has been gone for years. If you want a Christmas light fix, check out Silver Dollar City in Missouri. They basically said “hold my (root) beer” (no alcohol in the park, you see) and put up 6.5 million lights — more than what the Disney display had.
Photos from this event have been added to the Theme Parks gallery:
In Branson, Missouri is a building claiming to be the World’s Largest Toy Museum. I do not know if this is truly accurate, but after visiting, I can say this place certainly is the largest collection of toys I am aware of 😉
The facility opened around 2001 (it is unclear on the website when the actual year was, only that they moved to Branson that year). It was initially one building, then in 2015, they expanded in to the building next door. That building also has a lower floor accessible from the outside, so I refer to it as the third building.
As I go to write this, I now see there is the original building – World’s Largest Toy Musem – and the second building is called The Memory Barn. This explains the charge on my credit card I was trying to figure out.
My gallery now has aver 500 photos taken in the museum — and that barely (BARELY) scratches the surface of what all is in these three buildings. While I was there, I also took over 100 VR360 photos, which I will eventually get posted to a gallery on the Branson in VR Facebook group.
My Theme Parks gallery now has over 2500 photos taken at Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri. The most recent batch features their Harvest Festival, featuring thousands of pumpkins, special lighting, and more.
I did a bit more sorting to the photos as I learn the layout of this park. I still have virtually no understanding of where one “area” ends and another begins, beyond the obvious areas like “Grand Exposition” (which has a big sign as you enter it), “Fire District” (also a sign) and now “Wilson Farms” (another sign).
Eventually, I’d like to group all the photos by the area they are in. According to the map…
…it looks like I have much to learn:
Fire District
Grand Exposition
Homestead Ridge
Hugo’s Hill Street
Main Street
Midtown
Rivertown
Valley Road
Wilson’s Farm
Nine areas shouldn’t be too difficult to learn, should it? But at Silver Dollar City, most of the areas look like Frontierland to me, and I have yet to “learn” the subtle differences so I can recognize one western building selling corn dogs form another western building selling corn dogs.
New photos added to the Universal Studios/SeaWorld gallery. This includes Universal Orlando Resort, SeaWorld, SeaWorld’s Howl-O-Scream event, and photos from my first-ever visit to the amazing Discovery Cove.
Years ago, I had a brief online exchange with someone about the use of Walt Disney World busses. At the time, they had spent a decade collecting statistics, riding bus routes, and researching. They knew the average times between buses at different times of day, and during different times of year.
My question was simple… Are busses ever a faster option?
The title of this post is what their response was.
No. Never Faster. Painfully slow.
Now, when it comes to staying offsite with a car versus staying onsite and using buses, I can personally say that my “research” agrees. I was able to leave my offsite hotel (the cheap kind, where you open a door and walk ten feet to your car, not the expensive kind where you might have a ten minute walk to the parking lot) and be at the front gate of all the parks except Magic Kingdom before my onsite friends could make it using the busses. Magic Kingdom is a special exception since you can drive to the parking lot quickly, but then there is still that lengthy journey to the park itself via monorail or ferryboat… while onsite buses can drop off near the park entrance.
Because of this, I had never stayed “on site” during any Walt Disney World trips. Amusingly, even Disneyland Resort has a longer walk for guests staying at the official Disneyland Hotel west of the park compared to off-site guests who stay at off-site hotels east of the park on S. Harbor Blvd. There are a number of hotels on that side that have a much shorter walk to the Esplanade between Disneyland and Disney California Adventure.
When it comes to official Disney hotels, you may “get what you pay for” in hotel amenities, but one of them isn’t “time to get to the park.” 😉
That was then…
That is how things were nearly twenty years ago when I was visiting Orlando for Epcot’s 25th Anniversary. Since then, a few things have changed… Back then, I would have recommended renting a car even if staying on-site to get the benefit of being “closer” to the parks (depending on where your hotel was) and bypassing the slowness of the bus system. But, these days, Disney charges for parking at the hotels and, if you didn’t have an annual pass that includes park parking, you’d be paying two parking fee each day you drove to the parks.
Disney must really want you to ride their busses.
This is now…
Since then, some things have changed for the better. Today, the Skyliner connects several hotels to Disney Hollywood Studios and Epcot. This gives those hotels an unbeatable advantage to anyone staying offsite and driving in.
Art of Animation/Pop Century Skyliner station, 2024.
With today’s annual pass price (that includes theme park parking) being so high, it is no longer a better value to buy an annual pass to take one week-long trip (when you first activate the pass) then a second one a year later just before the pass expires. Those “no brainer, buy a pass” days seem long gone. Thus, driving in by car now requires paying $30 to park at a theme park! That adds an extra $210 to a weeklong visit.
But today we have Lyft and Uber and other ride sharing services. And you can buy a lot of short rides for $210.
I’ll put together a part 2, discussing visiting Walt Disney World, Universal Orlando Resort and Disneyland without a car, and without riding buses.
…and I had no idea until I visited and saw it on some banners.
SeaWorld 60th anniversary.
60th anniversary is a bit of a cheat. While the original SeaWorld in San Diego did open in 1964 (making the SeaWorld brand 60 years old), the Orlando park did not open until 1973. Happy 51st anniversary, SeaWorld Orlando!
I suppose this is similar to how Walt Disney World celebrated “100 years” in 2001, based on the birth year of Walt Disney, then later celebrated the 50th anniversary of Walt Disney World.
SeaWorld 60th sign.
You will notice that, unlike the SeaWorld of the past, this SeaWorld does not seem to promote its animal shows at all — just roller coasters and their water/flume ride. More on this later…
SeaWorld entrance plaza sign.
There were some photo signs around the park with specific dates, such as this one about their Sky Tower, which I assume opened in 1975.
There were several others I spotted, but the one I think I liked the most was about their classic water ski show. I remember watching some version of that in the pre-Epcot era of Orlando:
In front of Seafire Grill (well, outside the bar area for it) was this photo, which I suppose is showing what that building used to look like. I have no memories of it from my childhood visits, but it certainly gave me tiki vibes.
There were even tributes to the more recent history of the park during its years under Anheuser-Busch ownership. Though this sign made me sad, because it reminded me I have to pay for beer at this park now.
Speaking of adult beverages, of course there was a specialty drink with a special souvenir cup.
The blue clam shell looking thing on the top of the straw was some kind of dissolving glitter thing that made the cocktail sparkle.
I expect there was more going on throughout the park, but those were the main things I noticed. Unlike Disney, SeaWorld is not set up to have anniversary parades and fireworks and such. I bet their 60th anniversary doesn’t even last 18 months 😉
But I digress… A quick recap of the history of SeaWorld, taken from the always-accurate Wikipedia entry:
1964 – SeaWorld San Diego opens.
1973 – SeaWorld Orlando opens.
1976 – SeaWorld parks sold to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. (I know nothing of this, but apparently HBJ owned Cypress Gardens near Orlando which I knew of, but never visited before it closed.)
1978 – SeaWorld San Antonio opens. I grew up in Texas and never visited this park. I did, however, visit the very first Six Flags over Texas near Dallas, and frequented my local Houston park, Astroworld, which became owned by Six Flags.
1987 – There was a hostile takeover attempt!
1989 – SeaWorld sold to Anheuser-Busch, maker of Budweiser. Because, reasons. (Busch Gardens and many smaller complexes were operated by the beer company. In Houston, there was a small and short-lived Busch park, though I only remember us visiting it to see a trained bird show. The park side may have been gone by then.)
2008 – Anheuser-Busch sold to Belgian-Brazilian brewer InBev.
2009 – InBev, who was not in the entertainment business, sold the parks to Blackstone Group. They renamed to SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment.
Which brings us to today where it seems clear the park is moving away from the SeaWorld branding by removing it from the company name, and deemphasizing animal shows in their 60th marketing.
With all the roller coasters the park has been adding — two have opened since I returned to visiting the park in 2020 — I am going to randomly predict that the future of SeaWorld will be a different name, and the removal of the “trained animal shows.” We have already learned that the orcas will not be replaced, so that will leave only the Sea Lion and Otter show and the Dolphin Encounter show.
Perhaps after a few more roller coasters, it will simply be a water-themed coaster park where all the rides feature aquariums and are named after sea life.
We shall sea. Until then, you can browse thousands of my SeaWorld photos taken during my digital camera-era visits:
