The Escobar Strip

The gaudy commercial corridor between Escobar International and downtown, lined with neon-signed motels, 24-hour diners, and the kind of businesses that thrive on jet lag.

The Escobar Strip is the three-mile stretch of road between Escobar International Airport and the edge of downtown Vice City, and it's exactly the kind of corridor that every major airport grows: a gaudy ribbon of motels, chain restaurants, adult businesses, and convenience stores optimized for people who are exhausted, disoriented, and carrying cash. The motels range from chain brand-new to chain brand-abandoned, with a long middle tier of independently-owned operations where the parking lots are half full of long-term guests whose life situations are not asked about. The diners are 24-hour institutions where airline crews from every continent sit shoulder-to-shoulder with truckers and people killing time between flights. The Strip does an enormous amount of incidental business for Vice City's criminal economy: it's where drivers get picked up, where couriers hand off bags, where the out-of-town money launderers stay in rooms paid for in cash, and where anyone trying to disappear for three days with no questions asked can do it reliably.