Las Vegas won out over a cottage on the Oregon coast the day my wife, Sally, came home on the verge of tears. We had been weighing various choices for a week's vacation, the last time we would have to ourselves before our first child was born. With Sally in her third trimester, plane rides of two hours or less were the limit.

After a long morning spent shopping for something to wear on the trip, Sally returned with a plain rubber swim cap and nothing else. "I just got a look at myself in a full-length mirror," she said. The swim cap was an act of penance, as if she were determined to exercise her growing girth away with endless laps in some sterile indoor pool.

"Las Vegas it is," I said, mounting a rally. "We'll get some sun. Do a little swimming." The cap, I told her, was an inspiration. Sally nodded mute agreement, then went off to brood about a maternity bathing suit on her own.

For our first 48 hours in Nevada, unseasonably cool temperatures had us bundling off to the movies during the day and adding on another sweater when we ventured out to a restaurant in the evening. We might as well have been at the cottage in Oregon, gazing into a fire. On our third day, the sun finally blazed over the desert.

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