KEY POINTS:
It's a balmy evening and I'm leaning over a bridge in Venice. Above me a painted sky glows softly in the twilight, and below me a gondolier poles his craft slowly through the Grand Canal. He is serenading his passengers in Italian and his powerful voice bounces off
the quaint shops lining the canal and booms around St Mark's Square.
Okay, it's actually 10am and I'm in the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, but after five days of theme hotels, theme shopping malls, and casinos where it's eternally night, I'm ready to believe I'm anywhere, anytime.
The city's contrived, controlled indoor environments have skewed my sense of time and place, so to restore the balance we take a day trip into the great outdoors.
Even this is done Vegas-style - a little bit loud, a big bit garish, but a whole lot of fun. An outfit called Pink Jeep Tours is exactly what you'd expect, and the stretch soft-top Jeep and luxurious Chevrolet SUV that arrive to pick up our group are a flashy hot pink colour, customised especially for the company.
Guide Jerry Seeler has a wild hairstyle that flows as freely as his commentary. He's from Southern California but his knowledge of Nevada is wide. As we head into the Mojave Desert, we learn everything we ever wanted to know about the area, and things we probably didn't.
The desert landscape imparts the same sense of vastness I associate with the Australian Outback. Plains covered in low scrub stretch in all directions, sometimes broken by barren ranges and strange rock formations, and sometimes merging with the distant horizon.
When we stop at the Paiute Indian Reservation, even the Australians in our group are excited to see a roadrunner poking around among the saltbush and creosote plants - even if it doesn't look much like its cartoon caricature.
The reservation is on the way to the Desert National Wildlife Range, which at 600,000ha, is the largest National Wildlife Refuge in the continental United States. The main entry point is at Corn Creek, where spring-fed ponds form an oasis that was originally an Indian gathering place.
In the 1800s, homesteaders settled the area and remnants of their endeavours can be seen on a short trail around the ponds.
Their contribution of fruit trees mixes with native cottonwood and blackbrush to attract virtually all of the 240 bird species present in the park, plus a good number of mammals, reptiles and amphibians. There's also a refugium (an aquarium refuge) for the tiny, endangered Pahrump poolfish.
The refuge was formed in 1936 to protect desert bighorn sheep and their habitat, so we're surprised to learn that it is nearly hunting season for bighorn sheep.
It's equally surprising to discover that around half of the refuge doubles as the military's Nellis Airforce training and testing facility. Bighorn sheep and nuclear warheads? I can neither confirm nor deny.
From the desert we head for the hills, and I'm not talking about small bumps that desert-dwellers tend to call mountains. Our destination is Mt Charleston, which rises to 3362m in the Spring Mountain Range.
Altitude-induced ear-pinging seems to coincide roughly with Jerry's outline of the vegetation zones of the Mt Charleston Wilderness Area. Pop! We leave roadrunner country of creosote, blackbrush and Joshua trees (a kind of yucca) and wind up past junipers and low-growing pinyon pine. Ping! I notice road signs for deer and hikers as we get in among the big stuff, ponderosa and bristlecone pine, mountain mahogany, firs and aspen.
My eardrums have sorted themselves out by the time we pull up at the Las Vegas Ski and Snowboard Park. Chair-lift routes and ski runs slice through the forest, and high above us a stark mountain face is softened by fiery autumn foliage.
The temperature has dropped markedly and we pile back into our pink wonder wagons and seek out the warmth of Mt Charleston Lodge.
We take a quick peek over the valley from the expansive decks. Chalets and cabins tucked in the woods around the lodge are weekend hideaways of Las Vegas residents, who escape the summer heat to hike the wilderness trails, and ski in winter.
I pick up a real estate flyer and choose a "storybook log chalet" as my ideal mountain retreat.
At US$649,000 ($934,000), it's cheaper than most, but in reality I can barely afford a night in one of the lodge's cabins, which come with whirlpool hot tubs, individual fireplaces and a view.
Who knows though? It's only 35 minutes downhill to Las Vegas, where fortunes are won and lost.
