by LARRY NEMECEK

ST:C Senior Contributor

All right -- so the stars, VIPs, and media had their say. But what was the reaction of the average fan-in-the-street to the sprawling, $70 million Star Trek: The Experience?

Maybe not quite so average, since these hundreds had jumped at the chance to be among the first when the attraction opened for its very first day -- literally, beginning at 12:01 a.m. on Sunday, January 4. These were the very first to get in -- and ST: Continuum was there to meet these most rabid -- or lucky -- of the first shuttleloads as they emerged from the 22-minute event.

"Come do this -- it's great!," enthused Greg Hershinow of Atlanta, Georgia. "It's many Star Trek fans' dream come true. You are in Star Trek."

"I would say you need to get to Las Vegas warp drive," advised Steve Strasser of Wichita, Kansas. "It was fantastic! I've done a lot of flight simulators in my time, but I loved this one."

"You absolutely get the feeling as if you're traveling through space," added Marsha Colier of Los Angeles, the birthplace of theme park country. "And the museum and everything!? The attention to detail is really fantastic ... they put a lot of work into this and obviously spent a lot of money, and they really recreated the feeling."

"They didn't skip anything, ya know?" agreed Chris Hendrix, with friend France Cirioo from Coco Beach, Florida. "It's real authentic, the bridge was awesome, and the characters' acting really got you into the roles and everything."

"I'm a Star Trek fan... I grew up with it," said Ron Volz of Los Angeles. "(And) this took me by surprise. There's nothing like it. Fabulous."

"It seemed a little out of focus a touch, but ...that could be because the action was in my face, that's for sure!," said David Hahn of Albuquerque, New Mexico. "The screen was all encompassing. And it's cool to be the first."

No plants in the audience, no PR spin doctors these -- but their words echoed what the planners and the stars had been saying all along. Still, it took some kind of good old-fashioned fan devotion to snatch up the slots for the opening midnight ride, right?

"I just dialed away like crazy as soon as it went on sale through Ticketmaster," explained Hershinow, and Colier admitted "I stayed on auto redial!"

"We found out about the tickets, the hotel, and everything just by following the webpage," Hendrix said. "We'd been on the mailing list too. We ordered the tickets way ahead of time ... that morning when they came on sale."

The time-slot tickets -- tied in with various opening-only souvenirs -- lasted only until 9 a.m., and the lines were orderly as fans waited elsewhere until their appointment neared and then took their place by time group. It was not until well after the sun came up that the first real queues for routine operations began to take shape; by 11 a.m., these comers stretched in a line through the adjoining Space Quest casino and out through the length of the Hilton's North Hall. At full capacity, the attraction's twinned set-up is designed to entertain up to 1,000 comers an hour.

So, between Paramount Parks' opening blitz of events and the Las Vegas Hilton's all-night hospitality in the town that truly never sleeps, the first-come fans had a more leisurely wait overnight than even the VIPs who hours before had packed the attraction following the "grand de-cloaking."

Some of the 12:01 crowd, though, weren't quite aware of the place in history they had just recorded. "That was the first one?" Mike Bleacher of Denver, Colorado, asked us afterward. "No one went ahead of us?"