Rock Sound At SXSW

Rock Sound and Xtaster take on this year's SXSW festival in Austin, Texas.

Posted Thursday, 19 March 2009 by Amy Freeborn in

Blog

It was an uncomfortably early 6am start to our Tuesday, as we readied ourselves for the 10+ hour journey to Texas to attend South by South West - one of the world's most fun and all-encompassing music festivals.

For those who don't know, SXSW is a 5-day musical extravaganza of hundreds of bands and artists playing in hundreds of venues behind basically every second or third door on predominantly one down-town Austin street, from midday until the early hours for five-days-straight.

Arriving at Heathrow at 8.30am for our 10.40am flight, we were met with something that has now become synonymous with our Texas trips, delays. Although generally the delays begin once we hit Texas and wait for our connecting flight to Austin. But this time, the delays started on home soil.

Of course a delay is not necessarily cause for despair. For us Xtasterians, it's simply an opportunity to get the party started early with some pre-flight pints and bloody marys. And pints we had. About four on some people's tally.

Props to Continental Airlines, fantastic in-flight entertainment system, which included 263 movies and more than 150 television programs. Those 10 hours flew (hahaha) by.

Landing in Houston with only about 20 minutes to make our connecting flight, things weren?t looking promising. Especially when we hit the line for Customs, which seemed miles long. However, in a lovely turn of events, even though we eventually got to our connecting flight's departure gate more than an hour after scheduled take-off time, the plane had been held for us (and everyone else on our ex-Heathrow flight) because the Austin-bound flight was made pretty much entirely of our fellow delayed passengers.

About half an hour, and some stomach churning turbulence later, we touched down in Austin, one of our favourite homes away from home.

A quick hotel check-in, drop off and freshen-up later, we hit the hotel bar for a starter drink, then headed into Austin's bustling hive of activity, 6th Street. And can you guess where we went for dinner? Anyone who knows us well will know the answer, of course it was The Iron Cactus.

Considering that, by the time our dinners (burger, enchiladas and nachos accompanied by beers and margaritas) arrived, we'd all been awake for near-on 24-hours, it was a relatively quiet night, we all turned in around midnight, local time.

But never fear, the late-night tales, hijinks and hilarity hasn't even begun yet. Stay tuned for more as our SXSW adventure unfolds.

Until tomorrow...