Limbo.

No closer to knowing the fate of my next Vegas trip, a month out.

Bars have been closed in Vegas for a couple weeks now. There's no indication that they are getting any closer to opening. If anything, cases seem to be continuing to rise, so unless some outside pressures come to bear on the Gov of Nevada, prospects aren't looking good. I'm fine with the shows being closed. I'm fine with every other slot or VP machine being turned off. I'm even fine with 1/3 of the strip resorts still being closed. I'm not fine with bars being seemingly arbitrarily shut down.

I've been more or less supportive of the mask and shutdown orders both here and in Nevada, but the "leave the casinos and restaurants open but pick on the poor bars" strategy in Nevada makes little sense to me. There's just as much congregation at a booth in a restaurant or a craps table in a casino as there is in a bar. Vegas is a city of "vice", why single out one vice as seemingly the bad guy of the bunch?

But it's not up to me. And that leaves me with two simple options, assuming the status quo remains in place by Aug. 22. Cancel the trip and play the waiting game again like I did for months between March and June, hoping the bars reopen. Or take the trip as scheduled, and try to make the best of it. Another compromised trip, as the last one was. But this time, at least for me, fundamentally compromised.

I can't afford to sit at machines on the casino floor all day throwing money away to be served drinks there. That would also bore me to tears. I also don't want to have to be seated at 10 different restos and have to order an appetizer 10 times a day to be served. I don't want to consider a trip without being able to do my strip-long and glorious bar hopping crusade daily, seeing none of my bartender buddies. It just wouldn't be a trip.

I have some time to make the final call. I don't really have to cancel things until the week before the trip, to not have any financial impact, but I'd probably need to give my work a couple weeks notice that I'm cancelling the time off. That'd be the 7th of August basically, so less than 2 weeks away.

This year is a titanic cluster fuck.