Along about this time of year, I get the ancient urge toward sunshine, lounge chairs and umbrella drinks summed up by those two beautiful words: tax exile. No, wait, I'm sorry -- spring break.

I hadn't had a real vacation in months, and I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I came down with some kind of extended-play flu a couple of weeks ago. I know it's not bird flu because birds fly away eventually.

So I thought perhaps some warm desert air would be just the thing to melt my congestion and soothe my lungs. A rest cure. Someplace quiet and remote, without too much activity, where I could get some good sleep.

Instead, I went to Vegas.

I had never been to Vegas, which seems odd, even though I don't gamble. I mean, everybody has been to Vegas. The guy at the Laundromat has been to Vegas many, many times; I know because I used to hear about his travels at length waiting to get quarters while he dictated his lottery numbers -- 115,000 in all -- to the cashier.

Even many foreigners have visited Las Vegas, because it is, to them, the epitome and distillation of everything American. It's Western, it's all about money and show biz, it's big, loud, tacky, slightly dangerous, blazing with colored lights and filled with underdressed and top-heavy girls. It's like Disney World for grown-ups, with the monorail and the costumed characters, the wild mix of architecture and the staggering expense. Sin City seems a little too dark as a nickname; I think of it more as ViceLand.

I enjoyed my three days there immensely, because I am a big fan of the absurd. The Las Vegas Strip was built atop vast underground reserves of absurdity, which leaches upward until it is circulated through the faux canals at the Venetian and sprayed into the air by the Bellagio fountain.

You can see this for yourself if you can get to the Bellagio fountain. I have never been anyplace where it is so hard to find outside. I knew that casinos don't have clocks or windows so as to avoid giving gamblers any sense that time is passing and their children sitting out in the car may have starved to death or perhaps gone through puberty, but I had no idea it would be so hard to find a door onto the street.

Most buildings have well-marked exits; in the casino-resort-hotel-theater-shopping-mall complexes, you can walk for miles through several faux countries and the endless ringing of the slot machines with one increasingly desperate question in your head: "What the hell have they done with Las Vegas Boulevard?"

True, there are highway-style overhead signs listing multiple destinations with arrows (GUEST ROOMS, SHOWROOMS, BALLROOMS, REST ROOMS, HIGH STAKES ROOM, RESTAURANTS, CASHIER, MONORAIL, WEDDING CHAPEL --->), but somehow that last left turn to Las Vegas Boulevard and the outside world is never marked, and you miss your exit and find yourself wandering over a bridge, up an escalator and into a showgirl wearing a piece of sequined dental floss who wants you to go to a time-share presentation.

When you do manage to fight your way out into the daylight, you find the sidewalks are paved with what look like baseball cards but are actually pictures of naked ladies.

Every sidewalk on the Strip is lined on both sides by people handing these cards out to male passersby, including male passersby who are walking with a female companion. The law may have a couple of blind eyes to turn onto things like that, but this strikes me as a poor marketing tactic, given that even a man who would gladly trade his frumpy companion for a nude rental on a baseball card is probably unable to express this desire in the companion's presence without risking grievous bodily harm.

But to me, the greatest mystery of Las Vegas is this, and it's a question I pondered over and over as I gazed at the grand edifices along the Strip:

If something cost tens of millions of dollars to build and is beautifully and luxuriously appointed, is it still in bad taste?

I mean, a half-scale model of the Eiffel Tower with its base embedded in an enclosed faux-French upscale shopping mall: gorgeous or cheesy? New York, ancient Rome, Morocco and Venice all glued together with slot machines and boutiques in an endless twilight -- magnificent wonderland or surreal nightmare of kitsch?

I honestly don't know what to think. I loved it, but I'm not sure how I feel about loving something so profoundly excessive.

I'm also not sure I should have been mixing cold medicine and daiquiris. I could use a few days off. I need some rest.