It's Not A Bender, It's A Lifestyle.

Some personal lessons learned during the past year of "challenged" pandemic Vegas trips. If some of these help out the intrepid COVID Vegas traveler reading this, so much the better. Go on weekends: Vegas is dildoes during the week in-pandemic. 75% of the strip, especially during the daylight hours, is closed or severely restricted. The town comes more alive Friday to Sunday, so I'll play the game for a while. The next trip on the docket is April and it's a Thursday to Monday trip. The bean counters were already diminishing things for day drinkers to do even before COVID and now it's doubly as bad. Adapt and adjust. Don't assume anything will be open: Relates to the above. On the June trip, I walked down to to the The District food area at MGM on a Tuesday at lunch time and nothing, nothing non-food court was open. What a joke. You can't reopen the casinos and not reopen amenities to serve the people in the casinos. Or the people will not go into your c...

GTM. Going Through the Motions. As it stands now, a peck of a heck of a haul of a time from the next Vegas trip. Not really in any kind of hype mode yet, it's so far away I'm just trying to keep it in the back of my head. I suppose if my tax refund comes through before being pirated by the IRS, or if some sweet Biden Bux come through, I may be able to squeeze in a quick weekender trip before April. I actually came within a nipple hair of booking a last second trip last weekend for the MLK Day holiday, but flights would have been too buku and I didn't want to drive on what would have been a two full day trip. Most likely though I'll hold off. I'm already in the save regimen for the April trip, so I don't think I'd want to blow $2K on a quickie. Those trips are just too short, I need a good 3-4 days minimum to work my way into a trip. It's fine right now to let the town come back to "normal" a little anyway. 25% of Vegas was pretty skint over Xm...

  Going to let the Vegas breathe a bit after the long Xmas trip.  Already starting to get the bug again, just 1 week back, but I'm going to let my better senses calm that a bit and give myself a few months to build up the hype. Secondary reason is to let the vaccine hopefully do it's work and allow me to get back to a Vegas that looks more like Vegas, unlike the Xmas trip. I had considered doing a "10th anniversary" trip in February to commemorate my first trip 10 years ago, but instead I'm going to be prudent and stretch that out to a birthday trip in April. Nearly a 4 month gap between trips but again that gives things time to calm down from the winter virus hit, and hopefully some more things will be up and running by the time April rolls around. I have tentatively booked Aria in a basic strip view room for the 21st-26th. Going over a weekend saves on PTO used at work and will likely be a better experience in terms of people on strip and things open for them. T...