Absolutely gorgeous morning that would soon become a sunny, dry and 85 degree day. Since the concert didn't start until the early afternoon, we decided to take advantage of dip in our pool. Big man Max came and joined us.
The kid is obsessed with walking around right now, but still doesn't want to let go of the handle bars. We encourage any form of walking, so Max just did laps around the pool with an occasional dip in the water to cool off. After our swim, we headed out to South Beach for lunch to fill ourselves up. 
What better place to do that than The Shake Shack? A beloved New York City staple, I thought it very important that Mitchell got his first Shake Shack experience with me in paradise. 
He went hard core and had a hot dog (NY style) and shack burger - a deadly combo. I was impressed. 
Me? Shack Burger with fries and a key lime pie concrete. It had actual pie crust in it and was off the charts. Mitchell later got jealous and got one of his own. Too good to pass up. Knowing that food was going to cost a fortune, we had to load up while we could. 
We had an hour or two to walk around South Beach. Mitchell enjoyed seeing the fakeness that exists there. Basically everything is fabricated, from the sandy beach to the clothing to the bodies. But how can you not love it? Its great people watching. 
So much people watching that I walked into one of the pools on the ground, soaking my shoe through and through. That would later annoy at the concert. We saw a couple of Ferrari's, Audi's, Bentley's, the basics. But you can only see so many luxury cars before you start to think, "Hey! We have a concert to get to!" 
Ultra - the list of artists and one very happy Mitchell. 
When we finally parked and got to Bicentennial Park downtown, we experienced for the first time what would be the next 20 hours of sweaty people all smashed together with lots of energy. The line to get in was intense, right off the bat. Once we finally got in, it was our mission to check out all the 9 stages and get our bearings down. I was immediately drawn to the following:Who can resist CAGE DANCING? I can't. Strangely enough, there was not one single act that brought us back to this stage, so it was our once chance to get our cage dance on. With some encouragement, I got Mitchell in there for a photo.
So thuggin'.
Too bad we didn't have other concerts in there because it had a great view of the high rises near the park.
The Carl Cox stage was pretty cool - definitely offering an interesting backdrop for future performers like Moby, Afrojack and Steve Aoki.
We headed into the Heineken tent to watch Steve Duda, friend to Joel (Deadmau5) to see what he had to offer. He played an unreleased cut from Deadmau5 called "Maths" that was extremely enjoyable. Here we saw a DJ who enjoyed using his iPad to controls some of the works as opposed to the controls. We'd later seem some older DJ's who were strict analog.
There weren't a lot of acts that we knew in the first few hours, so we decided to just check out some random people. We headed over the Live stage to watch Holy Ghost! play a set. I had heard a few Holy Ghost songs before, but unfortunately they put on a pretty tame and boring show. Very little movement on stage and relatively stale electro-pop.
People in the audience seemed to feel the same way as it thinned out pretty quickly.
So instead we popped over to see Benny Bennasi. I'm a Benny fan, he being the producer of some of my first favorite dance songs. He was the first person of the day to really get me dancing.
And not just me obviously, but thousands of other people gathered around the main stage. He played a killer dub step cover of James Blake's Limit to your Love, which I was clearly psyched about.
Our next stop and one of the most important stops of day one was at the Heineken tent again to see Porter Robinson. We had to fight a considerable crowd of people to get into this small, intimate environment. Apparently the festival producers underestimated Porter's popularity when they scheduled this one. But we eventually got in and fought our way to the front row before Porter got going.
This guy is basically Mitchell's idol in many ways - he is a 19 year old kid who has been producing electronic music for like 8 years and doing a great job at it. He was young, excited and played a fantastic set. As you can see, we got close...very close. Close enough for Mitchell to give him bones:
It was great and certainly a highlight of day 1, if not the entire festival. The people in that tent were going crazy and practically blew the place apart.
Exhausted, we purchased our $15 corn dogs. Yeah, you read that right...$15. We snuck in granola bars and stuff for day 2...those prices were ridiculous.
Bottle of water? $5. I licked off every bit of sweat from the bottle before opening it. Each drop of water was worth like $0.10.
Satisfied, we headed back to the live stage to watch another group perform. At first our reaction was like, "What? Who these crazy fools?" But then we started digging it in a big way and ended up really enjoying the set from none other than
Royksopp! I have two Royksopp albums, so I was fully aware of their awesomeness. They played a great and inspiring show, something I was not really expecting. The audience loved it. After that we migrated over to watch Pendulum, a band I really knew nothing about. The audience certainly did though, and really went crazy:
To me Pendulum sounded like something a high school football team would use to get all excited for a game. It really didn't appeal to me that much, so we ended up moving on after a while.
And that pretty much finished Day 1. We saw a bit of Tiesto, a bit of Carl Cox, a bit of some others...but we were really focused on day 2, which held a slew of our most anticipated DJs. On the way home we ran for the border to get some beefy, crunchy burritos. I love them so much. We were exhausted, but happy. We needed to get as much rest as possible to endure twelve hours of craziness on Saturday.
So thuggin'. 
Too bad we didn't have other concerts in there because it had a great view of the high rises near the park. 
The Carl Cox stage was pretty cool - definitely offering an interesting backdrop for future performers like Moby, Afrojack and Steve Aoki. 
We headed into the Heineken tent to watch Steve Duda, friend to Joel (Deadmau5) to see what he had to offer. He played an unreleased cut from Deadmau5 called "Maths" that was extremely enjoyable. Here we saw a DJ who enjoyed using his iPad to controls some of the works as opposed to the controls. We'd later seem some older DJ's who were strict analog. 
There weren't a lot of acts that we knew in the first few hours, so we decided to just check out some random people. We headed over the Live stage to watch Holy Ghost! play a set. I had heard a few Holy Ghost songs before, but unfortunately they put on a pretty tame and boring show. Very little movement on stage and relatively stale electro-pop. 
People in the audience seemed to feel the same way as it thinned out pretty quickly. 
So instead we popped over to see Benny Bennasi. I'm a Benny fan, he being the producer of some of my first favorite dance songs. He was the first person of the day to really get me dancing. 
And not just me obviously, but thousands of other people gathered around the main stage. He played a killer dub step cover of James Blake's Limit to your Love, which I was clearly psyched about. 
Our next stop and one of the most important stops of day one was at the Heineken tent again to see Porter Robinson. We had to fight a considerable crowd of people to get into this small, intimate environment. Apparently the festival producers underestimated Porter's popularity when they scheduled this one. But we eventually got in and fought our way to the front row before Porter got going. 
This guy is basically Mitchell's idol in many ways - he is a 19 year old kid who has been producing electronic music for like 8 years and doing a great job at it. He was young, excited and played a fantastic set. As you can see, we got close...very close. Close enough for Mitchell to give him bones:It was great and certainly a highlight of day 1, if not the entire festival. The people in that tent were going crazy and practically blew the place apart.
Exhausted, we purchased our $15 corn dogs. Yeah, you read that right...$15. We snuck in granola bars and stuff for day 2...those prices were ridiculous. 
Bottle of water? $5. I licked off every bit of sweat from the bottle before opening it. Each drop of water was worth like $0.10. 
Satisfied, we headed back to the live stage to watch another group perform. At first our reaction was like, "What? Who these crazy fools?" But then we started digging it in a big way and ended up really enjoying the set from none other than 
Royksopp! I have two Royksopp albums, so I was fully aware of their awesomeness. They played a great and inspiring show, something I was not really expecting. The audience loved it. After that we migrated over to watch Pendulum, a band I really knew nothing about. The audience certainly did though, and really went crazy:To me Pendulum sounded like something a high school football team would use to get all excited for a game. It really didn't appeal to me that much, so we ended up moving on after a while.
And that pretty much finished Day 1. We saw a bit of Tiesto, a bit of Carl Cox, a bit of some others...but we were really focused on day 2, which held a slew of our most anticipated DJs. On the way home we ran for the border to get some beefy, crunchy burritos. I love them so much. We were exhausted, but happy. We needed to get as much rest as possible to endure twelve hours of craziness on Saturday.
There are few events in this world that would justify attempting to make a cake shaped like a sombrero. The 5 de Mayo might be one. The other one would be Don Julio's triumphant birthday party last Saturday. To celebrate, he decided to have everyone pick up Taco Bell and bring it to the park to eat and go ape shiz on a pinata. Yes, it was cool.
Patrick sits proudly behind his creation. Okay, he wasn't beaming with pride. He had intended to create a sombrero hat cake, but it kind of turned out to look like a woman's derby hat with raspberry's. While we waited for Taco Bell to arrive, we discussed how we could have made the had more authentic. Learnings people. 
People started to arrive - and with them, precious Davis. Don Julio brought together about 20 people from school and church. Co mingling and food eating occurred, until disaster struck and the balloons floated into the trees. Fortunately, I was there to save the day.
Lest ye think we are wimps, just know that we take pinata busting very seriously...especially when there are 3 big prizes involved.
Birthday boy Don was the master of puppets. 
Don certainly worked me over with his skills. I swung many a time, and missed as many as I swung.
Patrick was equally without success, though he did get a decent wallop or two on that sucka.
Caitlin carefully calculated her swing, but she knew that don was no dummy. She anticipated his evil-doings, and took her chances by swinging at a different spot then where she had discovered the pinata.
BOOM SUCKA! Don't stand between a pregnant woman and her candy!!!! Serious damage was done...but it still needed some more bashing.
Cake time! This cake ended up being freakishly delicious.
27 years old and he's still got it. Nice lungs Don. 
Caitlin and I got busy doing what we do. Good luck guessing what that is.
Games were played and bonding occurred on all fronts. Caitlin practiced her mothering skills with surrogate child Davis.
And Don got busy being a kid on his birthday by playing with his new toy truck. Happy Birthday Don. What would I do without you? Probably go to Taco Bell alone, which would just be plane sad.
