Jen Castellanos, a visitor from Whittier, Calif., is suited up for the training part of her turn at the controls of an excavator at Big Dig Las Vegas, a business started recently by Michael Price. Those looking for a new way to have fun can, for a price, drive an earth-moving machine or even crush a few Cadillacs.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009 | 2 a.m.
Every 3-year-old boy in the world is exactly right.
And Michael Price is hoping to make a business out of it.
What with the near-total collapse of the construction economy, Price had a few hundred thousand dollars worth of earth-moving machines and some time on his hands.
Price’s regular business — selling or renting 10-foot circular rock saws to be wielded by giant yellow machines, and sometimes renting the machines, too — had fallen off. And for about five years, he had been thinking about opening some kind of bulldozer-esque theme park. (He was inspired by Great Britain’s Diggerland.) So, about a month ago, Price started a company, Big Dig Las Vegas. (Its Web site is playwithourcats.com — that’s Cats, as in Caterpillars.)
“I’ve been around them most of my working life and I still enjoy operating the machines, and I hoped other people might as well,” Price said.
Indeed they do.
When you grab a junkyard Cadillac in the jaws of a giant yellow earth excavator and crush it until the teeth meet, when you pick the Cadillac up into the air, spin it around and drop it, or later, when you run it over, exploding its tires under several tons of steel and diesel power — well, you are having a lot of fun.
Also, when you drive a bulldozer, it really does go brrrrrm-brrrrrm put-put-put. And that, too, is fun.
(How does a bulldozer drive? Turns on a dime, thanks to two independent tracks. And as far as suspension, or something going squish to make the ride smoother, the bulldozer relies on the planet to go squish.)
So, you want to be a 3-year-old on steroids? You make a reservation with Big Dig, they pick you up in a van and drive you to an empty lot in southeast Henderson, where the big toys await. They give you 30 minutes worth of training with the controls, a vest and a radio. Half an hour driving the bulldozer costs $130, and half an hour crushing cars costs $199.
And while that might seem like a high price for a half-hour of thrills in Las Vegas (or, more accurately, Henderson), driving a bulldozer or crushing a Cadillac is unlikely to leave you with either a criminal record or a social disease.
How does that compare with other vehicle rentals? Considering the excavator and the bulldozer cost $170,00 and $130,000, respectively, their rental rate is higher than that of similarly priced vehicles, such as a Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder or a Ferrari F430. However, the only objects those Italian cocaine-snorting surfaces are capable of crushing are themselves and you.
Plus, there is one thing that no 3-year-old boy could tell you, and you wouldn’t believe him if he did. It’s that when you manipulate the joysticks to grab a Cadillac and squish it, every crunch and give of the car shakes the machine and you feel it. It’s like crushing a can in your fist. And when you drop it, the earth shakes.
Brrrrm-brrrrm!
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