The Chances are excellent that not one of you reading this has not seen Las Vegas in film and photo, and marvelled as its sheer Over The Topness.
It has, after all, been immortalised in countless films and books, from Vegas Vacation (a Chevy Chase vehicle), Casino and the ineffably tragic Leaving Las Vegas, featuring Nicolas Cage at his finest, to Hunter S Thompson's seminal book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.
The latter, incidentally, is almost required reading for journalism students, the majority of whom seem to go through a rather tiresome "gonzo" period at some stage or other - "gonzo" essentially being a form of stream-of-conscience writing pioneered by the dearly departed Thompson.
Hence quotes from Fear And Loathing such as, "Las Vegas is a society of armed masturbators/ gambling is the kicker here/sex is extra/weird trip for high rollers . . . house-whores for winners, hand jobs for the bad luck crowd".
And, of course, who can forget the book's timeless introduction, "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like 'I feel a bit light-headed; maybe you should drive.'
"And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas."
Yet nothing - and I mean absolutely nothing on the planet - can prepare you for the reality of this city.
And when I motored into Vegas early one evening, in a BMW X5 - as opposed to the Great Red Shark, a much-abused Chevy convertible, as driven by Thompson and his "attorney" in the book - I literally, involuntarily and sharply sucked in my breath in, well, unmitigated amazement.
Perhaps most jaw-dropping and adjective-defying is the Strip - which to many is Las Vegas - comprising around 7.2km of Mammon, neon and resorts and hotels whose names read like a roll of honour: Bellagio, MGM Grand, Mirage, Caesar's Palace, Bally's, Luxor, Circus-Circus, Monte Carlo...
Of course, Vegas's raison d'etre is gambling, with one website alleging that while a mere 5% of visitors say they visit to gamble, 87% end up doing so, in the process losing around $6-billion a year.
Naturally, this is easy enough with more than 1 700 licensed gaming establishments at which to do so.
Gambling was legalised in 1931, although Vegas as the contemporary visitor knows it only truly began taking off when the infamous gangster Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo Hotel in 1946.
But even if - as I do - you subscribe to the wisdom that dictates that the easiest way to walk out of a casino with a million bucks is to walk in with 10 million, there is a huge amount to do in Las Vegas besides gamble, as the city's tourism authorities are eager to let it be known.
Leaving aside organised entertainment, if you're in the city for a short time, the best thing to do is simply gawk: and no matter how cosmopolitan and urbane and well-travelled you may think you are, the sheer, in-your-face-ness of Vegas is almost guaranteed to cause you to goggle and point and chatter like a country hick, as you suck in the wonder of it all.
Should taking in the estimated 24 000km of lighted neon tubing on the Strip and downtown ever wear thin, you can always marvel at the light and sound show at the fantastic fountains at the Bellagio Hotel, or perhaps the eruption of the volcano, every 15 minutes, at the Mirage Hotel.
Or perhaps ride the Big Shot, 115 storeys high, atop the Stratosphere hotel. This will launch you an extra 50 or so metres higher - and when I first caught a glimpse of it as we drove into Vegas, my brain briefly refused to register what my eyes were seeing, so astonishing is this device.
Or perhaps you'd like to take a gondola ride at the Venetian. I didn't, but I believe it's very popular and that your gondolier will serenade you.
Alternatively, you can visit the Liberace Museum, go see some big-name performer live, or gaze in mild disbelief at the facade of the New York-New York hotel.
Indeed, if you suffer from ADD of some form or other, this is your city. And when you finally get hungry, you can tuck into anything from Kobe beef to fine French fare to burgers and hot dogs, 24 hours a day, before putting your head down in one of the city's 124 000 or so hotel rooms.
You can get married, too. And despite the fact that I'm a confirmed bachelor, a small part of me just ached to be married, while sitting in a Cadillac, by an Elvis impersonator.
After all, a Nevada marriage licence costs only $35. Perhaps that's why there are about 315 Vegas weddings a day.
However, a divorce costs $450.
Incidentally, the place is apparently both the divorce and suicide capital of the US. Go figure, as the Americans would say.
But ultimately, sensory overload steps in. And as Hunter Thompson's "attorney" remarked - among several other less savoury things - in Fear and Loathing, "The action never stops in this town".
So while everyone should join the almost 37 million annual visitors to Vegas, if only to see a virtually indescribable explosion of Mammon, the novelty can, ultimately, wear thin, and leave a tacky taste in your throat.
Or at least it did for me after a while.
And so it was that when we motored out of Sin City early one morning into the Big Sky vastness of the Nevada desert, there was, it seemed, something very clean and celestial about it.