Bro, I’m in the hotel right now after day 2 officially ended and my body is like “Knock knock you old bitch, give us a fucking rest” but I have so much adrenaline! So I transferred all of my Charmera pics onto my laptop and I will now spam the Internet with poor-quality digicam pics from the first day and let me just tell you that I have been with my people for sure because I watched some lady probably around my age come up to the barricade, pull out a full size Polaroid, snap a picture with that, and then pulled out some other new trendy analog camera that I get ads for all of the time on Instagram. Then today, some guy (in his twenties) take a picture with his Nintendo Switch then pulled out some tiny digital camera and also took a picture with that.

I felt so at home!

OK, here we go.

Had breakfast at La Catedral with basically a room full of other Riot Fest early birds. It was on the way to the Douglas Park from the parking lot we had a parking pass for and we had some time to kill so we got a delicious egg and cheese croissant.

I had super good Mexican coffee and Henry had a horchata latte. This place was really good. Mexican restaurants have such good breakfasts!

“Take a picture of me with my coffee.”

Mt first picture upon entering the Riot Fest grounds! We were there in 2023 but only for one day. It felt good to be back. 2023 felt weird being at Riot Fest after taking such a long break but this time, I felt that same old exhilaration when we made it through security. LET’S GOOOOO. (Also, Riot Fest staff has some amazing staff and that always helps.)

I KNOW THAT’S RIGHT.

We were in the Riot Mall area browsing when Cardinals went on, first band of the day on the main stage. I liked them!  (I will say more words about these things when I do a true Riot Fest recap.)

Greet Death on the Radical Stage which always ends up hosting the bands that end up being my faves.

“Take a picture of me with Soul Glo in the back so that I can look at it later and hate it.”

Fleshwater was SO GOOD, SUCH MY STYLE. The singer was a Cure shirt (Wish album art).

We skipped Violet Grohl (Henry was like, “I don’t want to see that nepo baby” LOL ok since when does he have these kinds of opinions??) so we went to see Radio Free Alice instead. It was the right choice.

STOP IT. WE SAW TRICKY YESTERDAY. THAT REALL HAPPENED.

All the food lines were too long at the time we decided to eat (at the universal time for dinner so le duh it was a madhouse over there in Food Alley) but the line for Ralph’s Donuts wasn’t long at all, so donuts for dinner! (We did end up getting empanadas and yuca fries later.)

We did NOT get this donut because it was giant-sized but I had to take a picture because it was adorable. We got a bucket of horchata latte donut holes. Horchata has been the theme of the weekend. Every food vendor there was offering horchata-something and I’m here for it because horchata is great.

Henry was like, “Let’s go see deathbyromy” I wonder why but seriously, they were so good and I was like, “OK Henry you’re on a roll with these picks!” I was trying to be less militant about drilling down a festival schedule so I went into this loosely, having a few must-see bands on the list but not investigating and researching the rest like I usually do. I’m old and kind of busy now. So Henry was checking out band descriptions on his phone and he would say things, “Go to the Radical stage, you’ll like this next band” and he was ALWAYS RIGHT. Can he maybe apply this to other areas of life?!?!?

Eh, they can’t all be perfecto.

Five Riot Fest, zero rides on the ferris wheel.

What? It’s Foxy Shazam, you can’t tell?

Well, I guess that was all for Friday. This wasn’t the end of the night but pretty close. I think we still had the Pixies and (some of) Twenty One Pilots after Foxy Shazam.

(OMG I just realized I get to use my Riot Fest blog category again!!!)

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