This past weekend I attended the Austin City Limits Music Festival. As a revenge act for not going last year I got me a nice 3 day pass; and most of my local friends decided to go as well. It was both a lot of fun and extremely tiring. These festivals aren’t easy on an old guy like me. I was expecting a lot of people to stay over at my place during the weekend but at the end it was only Nathan, Sarai, Mindy, and Jill. Nathan is a wuss and bailed out on day three. On the other end of the spectrum, Mindy and Jill are total warriors, doing all three days early in the morning followed by downtown partying, plus one all-nighter on Saturday and the drive back to Houston on Sunday night. Respect. Bernardo Dychter, Baruch Chollow (whom I hadn’t seen in a looong time), and Alex were in town as well.

More info, photos, and a video if you keep reading!

Some bands I saw: Manu Chao, Beck, Foo Fighters, Blues Traveler, Gnarles Barkley, CSS, among others. Some of the shows I saw I hadn’t even heard about before and most turned out to be really good. The only painful thing is that there are nine stages and you miss so much. Painful decisions my friends. Painful decisions.

Thankfully, the weather wasn’t too hot this year, but it was dry dry dry, which brought me memories of past ACLs: dirt clouds and a three week long throat infection that followed. So far so good this time though. Of course, parking and leaving at the end was a total pain. Parking was so bad I almost fell for this hard to resist offer (photo by Gabriel Neila):

I want to add that the food at the festival is surprisingly good. A large variety of local businesses set up shop, including BBQ fave The Salt Lick with their awesome chopped beef sandwiches, super good Wahoo’s fish tacos (not exactly local though). The first and second days I kept seeing people walking around with these mysterious tortilla cones with some sort of chicken schnitzel and other stuff in them. It looked great. The third day I finally had one. I will let a pro describe it, but it was really good. Too bad the actual place is so far.

Photos have been uploaded in The MKX® Photo Gallery.