This past weekend, I traveled to Las Vegas with Hubs and another couple we are friends with. Originally, Hubs wanted to surprise me with the trip to see Celine Dion’s new show at Caesar’s. (is that the rave she’s talking about? Perhaps she doesn’t know what a rave is???)
We made the travel plans back in January and were all very excited to head out west to see Celine chest-pump her way through her greatest hits. Ok, so maybe we weren’t ALL VERY excited… poor Hubs was a good sport (seeing as how this would be his 2nd Celine concert…)
Anyway, as we were making final plans of what else we could do in Sin City, we discovered that the Electric Daisy Carnival was taking place the same weekend that we would be in town. For those of you that have never heard of the Electric Daisy Carnival, it is a three-day, dusk-to-dawn, electronic music festival held this year, for the first time, at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. It has been held for the past dozen or so years in Los Angeles, but LA basically kicked the festival out after last year when a 15 year old girl died from a drug overdose. Sad.
Now, I will admit something here. (as if admitting that I do, in fact, like Celine Dion, wasn’t embarrassing enough…) I am a closet techno music fan. There. I said it. I like to dance. Ok, so, I like the idea of dancing more than actually dancing; I feel very self-conscious when I dance… like I’ve got a fierce “white-man’s overbite” going on… nevertheless, I like techno/dance/electronica music. J
So, on Friday, Hubs called me to ask if I would be interested in going to the Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC) since the other couple that we were traveling with was going to go. The husband was going to surprise his wife (my friend, Paige) with tickets for Saturday night/Sunday morning.
Since my motto is that “life is an adventure”, I figured why not? When else am I going to have the chance to attend a rave? And, if I’m ever gonna do it, why not attend one in Las Vegas? So, we bought the tickets and made the plans.
I will admit to being a little nervous. I had no idea what to expect. Would it be a rampant drug-fest? Would there be fistfights? And, most importantly, what the heck was I going to wear???? I had no idea what appropriate “rave attire” was, let alone if I had anything in my closet that would suffice. Hubs made me feel a little bit better when he declared that he would probably just wear jeans and either a “Funkin Gonuts” shirt (printed in the color and script of the Dunkin’ Dounuts sign) or a t-shirt we bought at the Wal-Mart in Lexington, VA with the tootsie pop owl and the phrase “Keep on Lickin’” on it. (yep, we’re a classy bunch!) Hubs declared that it didn’t really matter since no matter what he wore he’d still just “look like a cop.”
When it came time to head out, I opted for a simple outfit of shorts and a tank top and some ballet flats. I thought about wearing my running shoes (the only other closed toe shoes I had with me; I was not about to wear flip-flops or any open toed shoes; at this point I was cursing myself for not packing that extra pair of shoes that would have most likely been my low-top converse chucks… see ladies; when in doubt, pack the extra shoes! J) but I was afraid wearing my tennis shoes to a rave might make me look like I was commuting to work… I shouldn’t have bothered. While the ballet flats were sufficient; I probably would have been more comfortable trekking from the parking lot in BF, Egypt and ALL over the speedway infield and tennis shoes were NOT the oddest form of footwear I would see that night.
We left for the EDC at about 11:30pm and got to the speedway about 12:15am. We got our “tickets”, which were actually just little plastic credit-card like things, and our “VIP” wristbands (by the time we bought the tickets, they only had VIP tickets left…) and then went through 2 pretty extensive searches. I mean, it wasn’t quite TSA-style groping, but they made us take stuff out of our purses and patted us down and went over each of us with a metal-detection wand. The lady who searched my purse informed me that “open chap-stick is not allowed.” I almost had a heart attack. Anybody that knows me knows that, while I am not a drug addict or user, I am an admitted chap-stick addict. (plus, that was the only chap stick I had in the desert…) As hard as I tried to dress to fit in, I must have also looked like a cop because she let me in with my open chapstick. J
After we went through security, we took our fancy wristbands and “VIP” lanyards (and I took my contraband chapstick) and headed towards the festivities. It was quite a sight. There were 6 (SIX!) different stages all pumping out dance music. We headed for the “main stage” to see some folks that we were familiar with (and, by we, I mean Paige & Chris, the other couple we were with; they were very knowledgeable about who was playing. I admitted that I only knew one “famous” DJ and that was Paul Oakenfold… although, I do have some Numeriklab on my ipod…)
We made it to the VIP area of the “main” stage, also known as the “kineticFIELD”, and saw the end of Benny Benassi’s set. Next up was David Guetta. The whole scene was a sensory overload experience and it was actually a lot of fun. I’ll let my videos speak for themselves…
My apologies for the unsteady nature of the video; I was trying to focus on some folks dancing with glowsticks... (i'm easily distracted by shiny objects)
There are 2 guys in LED light suits on stilts walking around the front of the stage. Pretty cool.
I danced. I people-watched. It was fun. Some point, around 2:30am, my energy level just bottomed out and I could have just sat down right where I was and gone to sleep. A. I am old but B. to be fair, I had been up since 5:30am eastern time Saturday morning, so I was not operating on much sleep… We headed back to the car (parked in BFE) after David Guetta’s set was finished and I made it back to the hotel at about 4:15am. Although my ears were still ringing, I don’t think I’ve slept that hard in a long, long time…
Final thoughts: it was fun and I’m glad that I went. I felt really, really old at the rave. Although, the following night at the Celine Dion concert, I felt really young & spry. Especially compared to all the hoverounds and little rascals that I saw lining the isles… J
