Visiting The Vegas Strip During the Pandemic

After being taking the Covid vaccine, my husband and I decided to travel to one of our favorite places, Las Vegas Nevada. The changes we found were suprising!

RESTAURANTS

The biggest attraction to Vegas is all the wonderful buffets they have. . . .well no more people! There are no longer any buffets on the Las Vegas Strip. Now, I knew this before I went, but what I didn’t know is how it would effect the other places to eat. Since the large buffets are now closed and capacity is at 50% for restaurants, there were hour or more waits for almost every place we tried to eat at. I strongly suggest making reservations. We even waited at places for slices of pizza and sandwiches for at least 30 mins!

Everywhere was very clean and there was no self serve anything, including sodas.

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RIDE SHARE SERVICES

When we go to Vegas we Uber or Lyft all over the Strip. It saves our feet and is quick and convenient. Well we arrived in Vegas on a Tuesday and had the hardest time finding available drivers. Most times I had to keep refreshing the app until one was available, and even then, we waiting 20 or more minutes to get picked up. All the drivers we talked to said that tourism has been so low, most drivers stopped driving. It did get better as we approached the weekend, but still not like it used to be.

MASKS AND SOCIAL DISTANCING

All the casinos and restaurants in Vegas had a mandatory mask and social distancing policies in place. There were hand sanitizing stations at every entrance and free masks available if you didn’t have one. We saw everyone adhering to this practice except for a few outside on the strip here and there. Oh and we did pass a mini parade of anti-maskers carrying “don’t wear a mask” signs. But other than that we felt safe. They even took our temperature at some places.

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LIVE SHOWS

Although there were live advertisements for shows here and there we were no longer bombarded by people asking if you wanted to see a free show or wanted tickets to a show. The tickets for tonight establishments were all boarded up and shut down. It was very bizarre to see.

For the Bellagio Gardens you had to go through a roped off line throughout the entire experience. I liked this because it gave us so many photo opportunities that we usually don’t have with the normal crowds inside the gardens.

In the end we still had a lot of fun. I sure hope as things return to normal, some of these barriers will resume back to the way they were.