Austin City Limits - Sept 30 thru Oct 2 -2016Back last April, my friend Brenda was doing her jury duty which involves much waiting and she was very bored. She sent me a text that we should look at going to the Austin City Limits Music Festival for our birthdays (which are both in September). I think I thought about it for about 15 seconds before saying, “YES!” The tickets had just gone on sale and always sell out, so we purchased them right then. A few hours later we had our flights and hotel room and we were all set! Finally the weekend arrived and we were on our way! We flew out on Thursday and arrived in Austin just about rush hour. With our taxi driver driving along the shoulder of the highway and talking on his phone the whole way, we weren’t sure we’d arrive at our hotel in one piece! The La Quinta was centrally located and reasonably priced, and we were clearly not the only people staying there that were going to the Festival. Unfortunately, that “reasonable price” came with some downsides, such as a godawful smell in the hallway that permeated the whole weekend! That first evening we did do some exploring, which I’ll talk about in a separate blog post. And we figured out where we would need to be for the shuttle that would take us to the festival in the morning….just a short 1.5 mile walk away. Brenda and I racked up some major steps on our fitbits that weekend! Friday morning we made our way to the shuttle, which was air conditioned and greatly appreciated by that point! The weekend was very, very warm. The shuttle dropped us off about ¼ mile from the entrance where they had a very strict search area and the lines were long, but moved pretty quickly. The ACL is held at Zilker Park on the South side of Austin, a 350 acre rolling green public space. There were six stages set up around the perimeter of the park, and surprisingly you rarely had bands trying to play over one another. It was very clear that the organizers are serious about the “play” times as all of the bands started right on time and finished right on time! We attended all three days of the first weekend of the festival. As I mentioned before it was very warm and by Sunday we were hunting for the very few shady spots to hang out in…the good planners did have misting machines set up! Brenda and I both love nachos and we were thrilled to discover that there were multiple food vendors offering a variety of different versions of nachos. It became our mission to try every one of them! I believe we ended up having six different versions of nachos. As with any festival, the bathroom tends to be an issue and it was no different here! The first day the lines were crazy long....but somehow the next two days they must have figured out a better system because wait times were down to less than two minutes! They also had the Golden Throne that was available to the five people who found the hidden "key" during the weekend! Some of the band highlights were: The Strumbellas, Cage the Elephant, Brett Dennen, Nathaniel Ratliff & The Night Sweats and the big one we changed our plane tickets to see, Mumford & Sons! It was an amazing experience and worth all of the time spent waiting in line for a port-o-potty!!
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