Other random notes from our SXSW trip

I ate at the Whataburger fast food chain 5 times on our 10 day trip.

 

 

After our second show Neil got very ill and remained so for the rest of the trip, giving his illness to our good friend Brother Will from Brothers & Sisters before we left Austin.

 

 

Our van’s GPS gave us directions with female British dialect. Whenever we made a wrong turn or missed it a turn she told us she was “Re-cal-cu-lating.” Austin is not the preferred city to use a GPS because the interstate runs on top of or nearly on top of parallel streets and the GPS couldn’t always tell if we were on the interstate or on the frontage roads and thus she would give us very confusing and sometimes incorrect directions.

 

 

On the way from Denton to Austin we saw the Texas Motor Speedway. It’s big.

 

 

Our recording studio where we slept the night after our Atlanta show, took the new band glam pictures, is off of Faulkner Road. At a bookstore in Denton, TX I picked up some cheap secondhand paperbacks which are William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, Go Down Moses, and The Reivers, as well as Ernest Hemingway’s The Nick Adams Stories, and Anton Checkhov’s Selected Stories. Out of all those paperbacks I’ve had time to read one of Checkhov’s short stories.

 

 

On our way back home when we went through Atlanta we though we say a hotel with shattered windows from tornadoes that had twisted and ravaged their way through the Southeast the night before.

 

On several occasions we were reminded of something somewhat trite but true that AC/DC once sung; “It’s a long way to the top if you wanna Rock and Roll.”

 

 

 I feel like ending this blog on a very, very, very trivial note: on Saturday, after our last SXSW show we went to Target and all got something for Brother Will as a care package to show him our appreciation of his generosity. Here’s the trivial part—while I was walking down the greeting card isle my right shoe came untied, maybe my left, but I think it was my right, and perhaps it came untied because I put my right sock on first that morning (I did change my socks every day). But I got the shoe tied and didn’t come untied for the rest of the trip. This isn’t my most vivid memory, but it is still a memory nonetheless.