whew, what a journey! from the moment the inaugural when we were young festival was announced last january, my friend tati and i — who hadn't seen each other in 12 years(!) immediately hatched a plan to reunite and go together. you see, we lived together in a suite with five other girls in prime, peak emo time (2005) and bonded strongly over many of the bands who were playing. she and i had been talking about meeting up in vegas anyway since i love it there and she lives in idaho, so this gave us the perfect excuse. i somehow, against all odds, snagged tickets during the presale, and we were giddy with excitement as the weekend drew closer. you know what they say about best laid plans...but despite being faced with quite a major challenge, we emerged victorious against all odds!
DAY 1:
i was having a great time identifying the other elder emos at my airport gate, and both of the other people in my row on my flight were going to WWWY — which i surmised before even before talking to either of them from one of their two-toned, black-and-fire-engine-red hair and piercings. i was all like, "i don't look the part much any more because i'm old, but it's still in my heart."
the weather was absolutely gorgeous when i arrived in vegas, so i set my sights on the whimsical terrace pointe cafe at the wynn, which had a cutie pie patio overlooking the pool. i got a strawberry lemonade mocktail to pace myself and a hot smoked salmon burger (apple-smoked salmon, pickles, olives, onion and caper crème fraîche, frisée, cilantro, and watercress on an everything challah bun) and life was good. realizing i forgot to take a picture of the burger but it was so good!
healthy eating and drinking went out the window very quickly, and after lunch, i grabbed an iced cookie butter latte at the coffee bean and tea leaf because we don't have them in boston.
since, as i've mentioned, i've been to vegas a bunch so i've generally seen and done most of the stuff on the strip and was kinda gross from flying, i relished a little time to shower and chill in our hotel room and watch halloweentown II until tati showed up a few hours later.
we'd made dinner reservations at LAVO, a sleek and chic italian place in the venetian hotel where the ambiance was perfectly sultry for our first evening in vegas. i bullied tati into ordering a one-pound meatball appetizer that she rushed to give the waiter permission to cut into before we could properly document it...so here it is, a beautiful pound of splayed-open meat. worth it, though. she got a pasta dish and i got a very large chicken parm and everything was fabulous.
we ended the evening around the corner at the electra cocktail club, which was very dark and had very loud music, but was overall cool and surprisingly empty for a thursday night. tati went with a sazerac and i ordered the "western sour" from the cocktail menu (old forester bourbon, lime, grapefruit, and housemade velvet falernum).
DAY 2
during our trip, tati and i fell into a funny little routine since she's a night owl and i'm very much a morning person: every night, after i went to bed, she'd go on a little adventure to the 24-hour CVS in our hotel to buy random shit. and every morning, while she was still sleeping and i was up and ready to rock, i'd go to the starbucks right next to our hotel to get coffee. i'm pretty sure we did this routine every single day (except for sunday, when i realized there was a dunkin' not too much farther away). cracked me up.
anyway, we had to fuel up for a pretty packed afternoon of plans, so we grabbed brunch at jardin at the wynn. we ate on the dreamy little patio next to their garden and pool, and had the funniest/strangest waiter. at one point, he leaned in and whispered to tati "I LIKE YOUR STYLE" apropos of nothing, gave me an unsolicited iced tea to go when we got the check (?), and was just generally a character. i ate this amazing hickory ham and cheddar omelet and got a croissant as my side. i was expecting, ya know, a normal little croissant. this thing was massive!!! jam jar for scale.
we walked off our brunch by strolling down to the bellagio botanical gardens. i'd been before, but for some reason i didn't realize they completely change it to match each season? lots and lots of huge-ass pumpkins, cornucopias, and generally fall af shit.
then it was onto meow wolf, which is located in this really cool complex off the strip called AREA15. there's a main building with various shops, cafes, and bars.
it's funny; back when i went to st. petersburg, florida in february, we went to this museum called fairgrounds st. pete, and i didn't realize that it was basically a smaller version of meow wolf. this made meow wolf very very slightly less cool, but it was still super fun! especially loved the decoy supermarket in the front that had hidden tunnels to the rest of the museum.
then we had mocktails at this dope bar with an illuminated tree:
and had some barbeque at the in-house restaurant, the beast by todd english.
then it was on to lost spirits distillery, which was probably the coolest thing i've ever done in vegas and one of the coolest things i've ever done anywhere! it's a bit hard to explain, but it has been called "the willy wonka of booze" and i'd say that's a pretty accurate assessment. willy wonka & the chocolate factory is one of both tati's and my favorite movies, so we both naturally loved this. basically, you enter this very moody, vibey building and are given a rum sample in a glass. then, you walk around and into all of these rooms with different, rotating entertainers like snake charmers, acrobats, pole dancers, mentalists, and aerialists as you seek out three more rum samples. it's like a cirque show and alcohol scavenger hunt in one! there were also plenty of places to sit and chill and drink throughout, along with a live jazz band. dug it all so much!
DAY 3:
saturday...oh, saturday. you held such promise. so, when i took my morning walk to starbucks and was waiting outside in the line because it was so long, a few gusts of wind hit me and i was like "huh. it's kinda windy! hmm. ha. wow, wind! ha. it's fine. it's...fine." and indeed, as we would soon find out, it was very not fine. i was all dressed and ready to go in my cute festival outfit and hat, tati was doing her makeup in the bathroom, and i happened to open instagram to see THIS:
i literally barged into the bathroom on poor tati without knocking, screaming "you've gotta be fucking kidding me" because more than being pissed, i was in SHOCK. we were about 10 minutes away from leaving our hotel! suddenly, this festival that had provoked so much skepticism and doubt was certainly seeming to be too good to be true. but, from the start, we had been like, "at least we'll be together in vegas if it all goes to shit!" granted, i did expect we would actually make it to the festival before that happened, but still. so that attitude, along with my general repeated disappointment with various events in the past few years made it pretty easy to pivot and be like "ok. we're fortunately not flying home until monday, so let's try to get tickets for tomorrow. and in the meantime, let's go eat and drink. we good." honestly, i feel like my friends who were DMing and texting and tweeting me were more upset than i was at the time! haha.
we headed to fremont street and ended up at a place very creatively called eat. but the food was so delicious! also...and i am DEFINITELY only saying this because we eventually got tickets for sunday, the festival cancellation created a very memorable, interesting, and kind of exciting dynamic in vegas that day. like, we started chatting with the girls next to us, who were also victims of The Great WWWYF Depression but had managed to already secure tickets for sunday through a friend. but the sea of dejected emos in the casinos, on the strip, and in every restaurant and bar were surely a sight to see and one that i won't soon forget. the NY times did a great piece on it that i just saw this morning, actually!
many of the bands who were set to play, like hawthorne heights, armor for sleep, and all-american rejects, quickly announced pop-up shows at local restaurants and hotels. we decided against trying to compete with 80,000 other bored would-be festivalgoers to hit up any of them, and instead went to drink tequila at this very cute, small cocktail bar called lucky day. funny moment: tati taking this photo of me, showing it to me, and me not recognizing myself or that it was the bar we were in for some reason? "wow, that's such a cool photo! who is that?" "it's you, just now, dummy!" hahahaha. and we hadn't even gotten our drinks yet!
and soon, when we moved on to the smashed pig for another drink, it WAS our lucky day, as i finally got through the sea of stubhub searchers to get us tickets for the festival. it was all turning around! the only hitch: we originally planned to see magic mike on sunday night instead of saturday, so as we sat and drank our cute cocktails, tati called the sahara to switch 'em and it all worked out.
i have to say that the biggest disappointment of the day — even bigger than the festival cancellation! — was the peppermill. it's widely regarded as a storied vegas staple, and i had somehow never been, so we tried in vain to snag counter seats like 45 minutes before we had to be at magic mike because it was like an hour wait for a table. despite the fact that we could see several open seats at the counter, the hostess said it would be a short wait. ok, no problem.
as we sat in the waiting area, we realized the vibes were very chaotic and depressing, and it honestly felt like a glorified denny's. children were screaming, this guy next to us was being super animated and extra in an extremely obnoxious way, and we were growing more impatient by the second as 5 minutes turned into 10...and then into 20. i went to check with the hostess to make sure i didn't miss my name, and she's like "oh, you're up next!" ok. 10 MORE minutes go by, and nothing. meanwhile, there were at least 6 counter seats open! i could see them!
like, what was happening? it was just strange and silly and we couldn't afford to wait any longer, so we booked it to the sahara and found this little counter place called prendi that had huge, surprisingly good and doughy pizza slices and scarfed them down in 10 minutes.
neither tati nor i are into male strippers, but we love us some magic mike. the movies are cinematic treasures (namely, the final dance scene in XXL, mah LAWD) and the show ended up being actually quite feminist — as feminist as a male revue can be, anyway. there was a female emcee and it was very empowering and fun. that being said, you can bet your ass i was out of my seat singing to ginuwine's "pony" for the finale and enjoying the hell out of watching chiseled himbos writhe on stage to it.
since it was only 10pm, we wanted to get a nightcap somewhere and my trusty phone informed me that another cocktail bar in the venetian, rosina, had a great menu of classic cocktails — and when i saw that they made their whiskey sour with egg white, i knew it was a good bar. we snagged the two open seats at the bar and omg, guys, what a hidden gem. the two bartenders were so friendly and funny, the art deco decor was gorgeous, and it felt so small and intimate that you would hardly believe it was right next to the loud and crazy casino floor. and of course, the drinks were fabulous. can't recommend this place enough for a drink if you're in vegas. along with the festival and the distillery, it was a highlight of the trip!
a lil' drunk and in a silly goofy mood, we came back to the room and i pulled my cold chicken parm out of the mini fridge and got into bed and ate it like a pop tart because the plastic cutlery was no match for that frigid lil' filet. it tasted amazing and tati was laughing hysterically at me and then i started laughing at myself and it was just a great time.
DAY 4:
amazingly, incredibly, surprisingly....sunday's festival went off without a hitch and was everything we dreamed of and more. basically just a huge, fun, good-vibe singalong that was chill because we're all old now. all in all we saw 13 bands:
-hawthorne heights
-story of the year
-armor for sleep
-pierce the veil
-the used
-AFI
-jimmy eat world
-taking back sunday
-the all-american rejects
-sleeping with sirens
-bring me the horizon
-paramore
-my chemical romance
not too shabby! i was also so impressed by the bathroom and water situations. they had, like, actual bathrooms that were clean on the festival grounds and the lines moved fast! and while i was waiting for water in the alcohol line, some guy was coming through with a cart of water and gatorade for sale to speed things along. the food was good, too — i had a smashburger and pork dumplings.
overall, an excellent little trip down memory lane. vegas magic delivered, as always!
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