Woke up to excellent news that Tomorrowland would open to everyone (Option 1) at 2pm with the MainStage opening at 4pm, pending sign-off from the fire inspector. I had breakfast in Dreamville with a delicious chocolate croissant and then we all headed into the venue together. The line to get in was incredibly long but moved quickly. We got through security and headed right to the MainStage around 15:30 to see what they were able to come up with. As I expected, they built a brand new fairly basic (in comparison) stage in front of the old one. It was a long rectangle of LED screens with a DJ booth in the middle. There were trucks driving around on the dancefloor and crew racing around to get it ready in time. The LED screens were still being configured. The burned out scaffolding from the old stage was behind the new stage in front of it. A large crane was in the background, forming a giant "A" on the right side with a large framed tower counterbalancing it. Only half of the speaker towers were erected. The crowd took a seat on the grass to watch the construction and hope that they would be done in time for the first set to start in just a half hour.

We decided to head over to The Grand Library to see Pat Krimson while we waited, and then hung out there to also see Matisse & Sadko b2b Third Party. I stuck around for Jaden Bojsen, who I hadn't heard of before, but immediately recognized his track "Let's Go!" with the lyrics "It's 9pm on a fucking Friday. We're going to Hï. Let's go!" With the crowd thinning out, I walked right up to the very front in the middle and danced.

After that, I headed back to MainStage for Vini Vici, arriving around 18:20. By that point, the MainStage was fully finished construction and in production. I heard from others that they were still building some of the LED panels on the stage when the first DJ was performing!

Also caught Dillon Francis b2b Marten Hørger back at The Library, then saw Hi-Lo b2b Eli Brown, the amazing John Summit, and Eric Prydz at the Freedom By Bud stage on the other side of the festival. That stage was indoors but it was packed with people and very little air conditioning so it was sweltering hot inside. Ended the evening with Martin Garrix back at the MainStage. As the sun set, they had lights washing over the remnants of the original stage with different colors which made for a cool effect and a reminder of what once had been. The Tomorrowland crew had put over two years of work into designing that stage and over a month constructing it, all for it to be completely destroyed in less than an hour. But the crew really pulled off an incredible feat to save the festival by getting pieces of another stage from Metallica, trucking it into the remote town, getting it all set up in less than 2 days, and inspected for safety. I can't imagine how stressful and chaotic that was to coordinate, but if any festival could do it, it would be Tomorrowland. So grateful that we still got to have such an incredible first day of the festival nearly completely back to normal and on schedule.