And finally, we tick our last Guggenheim – the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum – off the list; a trek that’s taken us to Bilbao, Berlin and New York. It’s particularly fitting that we finish here at the Venetian, Las Vegas as our first Guggenheim was Venice.

Together with the Bellagio’s Gallery of Fine Art (which we missed because our otherwise excellent guide book got the opening times wrong), the Guggenheim Hermitage is leading moves to take Las Vegas upmarket. The Venetian not only replicates Venice inside and out, it’s the city’s first all-suite hotel, where even the most modest accommodation includes canopy-draped bed, spacious sunken living room, a couple of large screen TVs and the rest. Surprisingly, you can get all this from less than $200 (£100) a night.

A partnership with the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, the job of Guggenheim Hermitage is to add some culture to the Las Vegas mix. Like Deutsche Guggenheim, this is a gallery rather than a full size museum, but being Las Vegas no corners are cut and the steel panel walls are designed to somehow evoke the velvet of the Hermitage. It’s certainly an oasis of calm.

With the Russians a little cool on cultural exchanges just now (as befits a regime keen to shore up its position by promoting a siege mentality among the people) the current exhibition is pure Guggenheim.

Modern Masters from the Guggenheim Collection explores and challenges the five categories of acceptable subject matter defined by the French Academy of Art in 1648. The five genres and the hierarchy that goes with them seem ridiculously snobbish today but, to be fair, it was more than 200 years before Edouard Manet successfully challenged the Academy with Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass). That painting sadly isn’t here because it’s at Musée d’Orsay, Paris, but plenty of good stuff is.

Organised by genre are 37 works from 24 artists including Manet, Cézanne, Picasso, van Gogh, Kandinsky and Klee. All of which makes for a compact, but intellectually robust, show.

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Paris, New York, Venice. Three great cities transported to the Las Vegas strip in breathtaking fashion.

It’s a source of great regret that I didn’t make it to the New York, New York rollercoaster, we were tempted by a gondola ride in Venice (we’ve done that ride in Venice, Italy, but here the gondoliers sing), but I did make it to the top of the Eiffel Tower, Paris.

Up here you realise just how small Las Vegas is, the suburbs simply fade into the desert.

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I’d go back to Las Vegas at the drop of a hat to see Billy Idol – actually top dealertainer Walt Turner – setting the mood at the Imperial Palace, but if only little sister had picked a white wedding day to coincide with Elton John and the Red Piano at the (misspelt) Colosseum, Caesars Palace.

They don’t just do everything big in Las Vegas, they do it big right. Everything is an event and the Elton John shop at Caesars is a wonder in itself; get the glasses, get the boots… get ‘an actual nugget from [Elton John’s] Hollywood walk of fame star’.

…and all just twelve hours away.