Gambling is a sin. No, wait, I mean to say that gambling is intrinsic to Las Vegas, and Las Vegas is known as Sin City. Or something like that.

Whatever. My wife Mary Pat and I just spent a week in Las Vegas, and to the surprise of many we didn’t gamble – or game, as some would say – once. Not a single throw of the dice nor pull of a slot machine.

We’d decided to get away from the early-winter Spokane chill and enjoy a week in the Nevada desert. The big draw was a special event that was meant to cap both our birthdays. But I’ll get to that in a future post as – second cliché of the day – I’m not prone to counting chickens before they hatch (maybe it won’t work out).

Instead, let me run down our first full day, which turned out to be more than I usually do in a full week.

We’d left Spokane on a Thursday afternoon. And though you can book direct flights to Las Vegas, we opted to fly Delta to get the miles (and thus retain our Sky Priority status for another year). That meant we had to fly to Los Angeles, through LAX, and endure a near-three-hour layover before boarding our 49-minute flight to the desert gaming empire.

It had been something like a decade since I’d last been there for a quick visit, and more than two decades since we’d celebrated the second wedding (in an Elvis-impersonator chapel) of Mary Pat’s sister and our brother-in-law. And either I hadn’t been paying attention or the place had grown.

Whether one or the other, or both, Las Vegas struck me as having spread over the entire breadths of this part of the Mojave Desert (thanks Wikipedia). On the ride to our Airbnb, lights extended in every direction as far as I could see. I was apparently still under the impression I’d had the first time I’d been here, on the same day as the second Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston fight, July 22, 1963 (my family was driving across the country and had stopped for that one single night, and my father was lucky to have scored a motel room on the edge of the city limits).

This stay was a big improvement over that one. Mary Pat had booked us a two-bedroom Airbnb apartment that was far enough from the city’s downtown, and famous Strip, that it felt more like Phoenix or Palm Springs – except, of course, for the slot machines that showed up pretty much everywhere.

We awoke the next morning and started our day by heading to the Angel Park Golf Club. Though it was a sunny day, with nary a cloud to clutter up a cobalt-blue sky, the weather was chilly: barely 60 degrees. And when the wind blew, which it did up to 15 or so knots on occasion, it felt several degrees cooler.

That chill is why we encountered few others on the course we played (the club has three of them), which was fortunate for them as we don’t really play golf. We just basically hit balls until we get tired. And after nine holes, stiff with the cold, we were tired enough to quit.

That gave us a couple of hours to kill, so Mary Pat suggested that we visit The Mob Museum. Curious about what the place had to offer, I agreed. And though the price was a bit high (some $55 for the two of us), the museum itself was full of information. And not just about how the mob made a killing (pun fully intended) in Las Vegas, but about how poverty and immigration helped foment organized crime in the first place – aided by Prohibition and other factors.

I left thinking that we could have spent at least another couple of hours there. But we’d made reservations at a restaurant called Carson Kitchen. It’s one of those generic eateries that describes itself as “specializing in creative American cuisine.” And it didn’t disappoint. We were seated quickly, on a patio under a warming fixture, and both the service and food (the mac and cheese dish was to die for) was just what we wanted.

From there, we had just enough time to drive down the street, some six blocks, to catch a 7:30 show at the ultra-cool Beverly Theater art movie house. Unlike other art houses I’ve visited, this one offered a brightly lit and inordinately clean lobby, full of every kind of treat you might want to buy. And the theater itself offered raked seats that anyone who’s ever been to one of the Spokane area’s Regal Cinemas theaters would recognize (though to me, the seats were more comfy).

The movie  we were there to see was the Finnish film “Fallen Leaves,” a Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize winner that had yet to open in Spokane before we left – and which, of course, was why we couldn’t resist going. We love being able to score movies before our Movies 101 partner Nathan Weinbender.

The movie is a tender little story about two working-class people, struggling to get by in today’s Helsinki. Written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki, it stars Alma Pöysti as Ansa, a woman working at whatever job she can get and hold – supermarket food-handler, dishwasher, factory gofer. Jussil Vatanen stars as Holappa, a guy who is forced to go from one job to the next because he likes to drink more than be employed.

It's a movie grounded in depression that, slowly, gradually, opens itself to the very slightest chance of a moderately happy ending. Oh, and there’s a dog named Chaplin that arrives late in the story, too.

That about ended our first, non-gaming day in Last Vegas – save for the Tom Segura Netflix comedy special “Ball Hog” that we screened back at the Airbnb.

Then we went to bed, looking forward to whatever the next day would bring.