Or: Why My Friends are the Most Awesome in the World.

Austin City Limits is a huge, wonderful 3-day music festival that is practically my only live music event of the year.  Last year, I went with a bunch of friends and it was a blast, even the last day where we all started to get grumpy and tired.

All the pictures are from Saturday, when I snuck my camera in and Julia (curly hair) snuck in a bag of (non-hallucinogenic) mushrooms for a snack. (We bad, yo!)

If you’ve never been, people bring all kinds of “flags” on very long sticks so that others in their group can find them in the crowd.  There’s very little cell phone reception and, honestly, even when one’s phone does ring, you’re not likely to pay attention or even hear it.

We all went to get lunch and were trying to decide who to go see next, when we heard the band playing at the stage closest to the part of the food court we were at.

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They were a high energy, upbeat Spanish-singing group and we immediately got our groove on.

Which is why my friends are the best in the world.  This is my awesome friend Afton, by the way.  I would love to have her in all my blog posts, but she lives in California doing hard core grad school things.

And eventually it turned into our entire group of 5 or 6 people jamming out in the space by the farmer’s market portion of the food court.  Which was probably the best part of the entire festival.

We were very tired after all that dancing, so we found a more chill band and relaxed on the grass in the sunshine.  (ACL is awesome and you should go if you like outdoors+music. It’s just about the only giant crowd event I’ll do.)

This is the Drafthouse, which was a new but welcome addition.  Finally, they have beers outside of the Budweiser family.

Weezer, taking their bow.  I somehow ended up at the very front for them, off the to right.  I love Weezer but it was totally unintentional and completely awesome.

ACL makes one hungry! And the food is all from local restaurants and food trucks, so it’s yummy and fairly unique.  It’s definitely not your standard fair food. 

As night fell, they lit up the ACL miniature hot air balloon.  So pretty!