If you're heading to Vegas in the next few months and are in the mood for a good buffet you're going to have to go somewhere other than the Mirage and possibly even the Rio.

The Mirage Buffet closed a couple of weeks ago to undergo a major remodeling and will not reopen until later in the spring. Meanwhile, Rio's very popular Carnival World Buffet is also getting an overhaul and will be closed periodically over the next couple of months as the hotel does the work, so call ahead to make sure it will be operational when you want to visit.

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Weeks after the sale of the Desert Passage shopping mall at the Aladdin come reports that the owner of the Venetian is trying to sell the Grand Canal Shops to raise funds to build a new hotel.

Sheldon Adelson hired a high-powered investment firm to manage the potential sale of the Venice-theme mall, which could fetch as much as $400 million, according to some analysts. Adelson wants the cash to help finance a proposed $1 billion, 3,000-room resort to be built on the north side of the Venetian, directly opposite the upcoming Wynn Las Vegas.

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A compromise was finally reached in the contentious negotiations over a proposed Red Rock Station hotel last week that seems pleasing to no one -- but at least the hotel will be built now. Station officials had wanted a variance to build a 300-foot-tall hotel tower on land that was zoned for only a 100-foot-tall tower. The proposal to build nearly 2,000 rooms brought neighborhood residents out in force against it, spurred on in part by a local union's anger over the Red Rock Station being a non-union facility. After months of often very angry debate, Station officials finally agreed to reduce the number of rooms to 1,000 and to drop the height of the tower to 198 feet, a compromise with which neighbors are still unhappy and by which Station folks seem to be annoyed as well. If all goes as planned, Red Rock Station should open by late 2005.

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If you didn't make it town for the annual Consumer Electronics Show, count yourself as one of the lucky ones. It seems that the bulk of the estimated 100,000-plus people who attended the show all left Las Vegas at roughly the same time on a Sunday afternoon, causing virtual gridlock at McCarran airport. Check-in lines stretched into the parking lot, making passengers wait for hours. After that, they had to wait hours more to get through the security screening area, causing many people to miss flights. Airport officials say the mass exodus was an anomaly and that additional security screening facilities will open this summer to help deal with the problem.

The moral of this story is, if you're leaving Las Vegas on any kind of a major event weekend (Super Bowl, Valentine's Day, major conventions) get there early!