They say what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. It's a promise and a command. It's a brilliant advertising slogan because it suggests a momentary get-out-of-jail-free card for your sad sack life. Debauchery, jackpots, excess, moral bankruptcy, drunk women and drunker men. You will get drunk and lose money and your inhibitions. You will get dizzy from the dinging and zinging of the slots and the neon, you will watch beautiful fit people gyrate into positions you never thought possible, you will shed your clothing, you will see miracles: Elvis come to life and water spring from the desert. It's the heart of the Matrix and it's Disneyland for adults. And you will pay.

As much as you can see in two days, we saw. We drove the Strip during the day and again during the night. We walked through theme casinos and pure casinos: Bellagio, Paris, Treasure Island, Circus Circus, Bally's, Harrah's, The Sahara. We dropped a dollar into the slots in every casino and came out $5 ahead. We saw a drive-thru chapel and an Elvis chapel and watched the Bellagio fountains and marveled at a Cirque du Soleil show and ate at the buffets and rode the monorail and drove below the Strip into a chunk of old Las Vegas and the old casinos and gambling halls.

Overheard in line for something ... because in Vegas there are always lines... "No, that's completely absurd. We don't need twelve of them. Twelve is absurd. I think ten will do just fine."

Not five minutes into the slot machines and a dried up gambler with a tell-tale mustache sat at the Lucky Strike machine next to me and flashed a diamond ring he wanted to sell me.

This city is glamour layered on glitz layered on seediness layered on sand. Time to go... a final dollar in the slots on our way out of town.

What happens in Vegas indeed.