This past weekend we flew to Spain for Duran Duran’s 3-day Touch the Sunrise festival in Ibiza, a touristy/party island just off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean. It was a pretty crazy thing to do (we are definitely NOT jet-to-Europe-for-the-weekend people) but it seemed like a great decision back in the depths of another pandemic winter when Duran announced the rescheduling of their 40th anniversary celebration. Turns out it WAS a (mostly) great decision! There were some mild hiccups, moments of “oh shit!” and some irritations but mostly it was smooth and amazing.

Through Pollen, the UK entertainment company that coordinated the festival, we booked an official Touch the Sunrise hotel: the Hotel Riomar, about 20 minutes north of the main city on Ibiza. It was an absolutely lovely, pretty fancy hotel and I’d recommend it 100% but we were a bit perturbed about how far it was from all the happenings: we ended up spending around €300 in transportation during the course of the weekend.

We didn’t sleep at all during our red-eye flight from Chicago to Spain so decided to skip the first night of the festivities, the Come Undone welcome party at club Destino. We’re glad we did because some people that went – the first folks we met at the hotel turned out to be from a suburb of Milwaukee, hahaha what are the chances! – said that it was a shitshow of lines for drinks and even worse lines for taxis at the end of the night. They made it back to the hotel but some other folks that they knew didn’t get to their hotel til 8:00 the next morning!

On Saturday we headed to Hangar8289, a converted warehouse, to pick up our wristbands and see the Fan Exhibition. We skipped the screening of the Duran movie Unstaged directed by David Lynch because I’ve seen it and think I probably have it on BluRay. Instead we enjoyed John Taylor’s and Nick Rhodes’ art installations.

After Hangar, we decided to do our own walking tour of the old main town of Ibiza which was just a little under a mile from the art exhibit. A gorgeous old harbor, a ton of shops and cafes, winding cobbled neighborhood streets and the Portal de ses Taules, the old main entry point to the town that dates back to the 1500’s.

After heading back to our hotel and having dinner, we taxi’d – again – back to town to Pacha, a pretty famous club in Ibiza where a lot of superstar DJ’s rock the floor, for Roger Taylor’s DJ set. SO MUCH FUN! We scored a great spot on some steps about 20 feet away from the DJ booth so had a great view of Roger. He played a ton of Duran remixes (“Girls on Film,” “Reach Up for the Sunrise,” “Rio”) plus other 80’s dance classics like New Order’s “Blue Monday” and Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence.” I have no idea how I managed this but at one point my phone started vibrating like crazy: I apparently was dancing so hard that my phone made an automatic SOS call, thereby also alerting all of my emergency contacts of that and my location. I freaked and then had to send out a bunch of texts to my family that I was OK and it was my phone’s fault.

Sunday was the day of the big concert so we laid pretty low at the hotel all day, hit the pool, the Mediterranean (Joe went all the way in, I went up to my knees and that was it – way too cold for me!). We also had to get Covid tests in order to fly back on Monday so the amazing hotel staff arranged to have that done in our room so we were pretty stuck there. We headed down to the lobby to call for a cab around 7:00 and ran into our Wisconsin friends, plus some other folks they had met. They had already called for a cab and offered for us to join them. We waited. And waited. And waited. Well over an hour and it was looking like we would miss the show entirely. Fortunately the staff at Riomar is awesome and one of the young concierges was getting off his shift and offered to drive us the 25 minutes into town to the concert. All I can say is while you should always be kind and gracious to staff, sometimes it REALLY pays off.

We finally made it to Ushuaia, a fairly large outdoor concert club/venue near the Ibiza airport in time to catch the last bit of one of the opening DJ’s. The crowd was huge – a lot more people than I had expected – and getting drunk, fast. I love England but oh my god, Heineken-swilling drunk Duranie Brits are the absolute worst, men and women both! Duranies are universally confident that as individuals they are the biggest Duran fans on earth so putting thousands of them together in a general admission scenario…things got a bit testy as everyone tried to get the best spot possible. We did manage to get fairly close to the stage, though well off to the side, so I got a few decent shots of Duran Duran during their set. I wasn’t able to dance much as we were packed in tight and I spent a lot of the time trying not to get elbowed in the face by one particularly drunk English dude. We are very much looking forward to seeing Duran Duran again in August with assigned seating: I’ll be able to focus on the music and not my personal safety. Duran’s set was, of course, perfection. I was surprised with “Tiger Tiger” and delighted with my favorites “Planet Earth” and “Girls on Film.”

We left the show a bit early in order to secure a taxi – we had heard some nightmare stories about finding rides as mentioned earlier and with a 5:00 a.m. wakeup call in our future, we really needed to get back to the hotel. We ran into some other Riomar guests in the taxi line so shared a ride back with them, chatted about the many many concerts we’ve all attended over the years, which was lovely.

After about 3 hours of sleep, we packed up and checked out. Fortunately our scheduled taxi arrived on time and we got to the Ibiza airport with time to spare. However, our flight was delayed out of Ibiza to Madrid which was not OK – we only had 55 minutes in the best scenario so we landed with about 40 minutes to get our connection. The Madrid airport is HUGE, like you have to take trains to get to the other terminals huge. We literally sprinted off the plane, caught the train, sprinted off the train…and ran full-stop into a massive crowd waiting for passport checks into the international terminal. Not good. Once our passports were checked and stamped, it was exactly our departure time. Fingers crossed, we sprinted again, weaving our way around hundreds of people, through the worst-planned Duty Free shop ever that is smack-dab in the middle of the terminal with serpentine paths through the merchandise so we were dodging perfume and Toblerone displays. Once through that and thinking we were in the clear, we realized our gate was at the very end of the longest terminal hall on earth. I was gasping, heaving, burning and sweating buckets but we made it to the gate and managed to be the very last people to board. If you find yourself having to make a connection in Madrid, plan on a minimum of 2 hours between your flights and even that might not be enough. Once on the plane, all was smooth flying home. Even Chicago went well as we have Global Entry so getting back in to the States was a breeze.

Would I go to Ibiza again? Maybe! It was gorgeous, sunny, warm and delightful. I do wish we had more time to enjoy the food (we basically subsisted on the included breakfast at the hotel as our main meals since it ran from 7:30-11:30 each morning and was a massive and delicious spread) and the island’s history. But the club scene is definitely not my vibe so it would take another really good concert to make it a vacation destination.