I know you all usually come here to read about food, but every now and then I want to share something with you that I think is really cool that’s not directly related to eating. I just returned from a week in Texas, and started in Austin for a 3-day music festival called Austin City Limits. They have 8 large stages playing a wide variety of music all-day, for all three days. That is, usually for three days.

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The Colorado River

This year, unfortunately the weather did not cooperate and Sunday was forced to be cancelled due to unsafe conditions and flooding. That’s a shame and all, but the park was definitely very flooded and it sounds like the management handled the situation properly. And sure, they serve food at the festival and I have had some great food in the past at last year’s ACL Fest including french fries, a fried chicken cone, and wild game sausage, but this year I didn’t actually eat anything at the festival to share with you all.

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The crowds and a stage

I did, however do plenty of drinking at the festival and took some great photos along the way. A new addition this year is the enormous, fortunately shaded, craft beer tent. They have around 20, excellent, reasonably priced craft beers on tap with enough variety to make any beer lover happy. It’s certainly nicer than getting stuck drinking crappy tallboys all day. As you can see, we enjoyed ourselves there.

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Enjoying the craft beer tent

I know you’ve all heard “Don’t Mess With Texas,” but I’m also willing to bet that most of you don’t know that it’s a slogan about not littering!

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Don’t Mess With Texas

In any case, the festival is amazing. It takes place in Downtown Austin in an enormous, open field at Zilker Park. It’s kind of incredible how many people come out to this festival. I think it’s probably the most people I’ve ever seen in one place. Just check out the crowd that came out to see Kendrick Lamar perform!

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The biggest crowd I’ve ever seen, click for the full size panorama

In my experience, Fridays tend to have much lighter crowds than Saturdays and Sundays at ACL and this year was no different. This also seems to be correlated to the number of high-schoolers, who have class on Fridays, coming out and partying harder than they probably should be. You’ll find plenty of them falling over drunk and puking in the crowds, but I think that’s probably the state of all music festivals everywhere these days. Non-high-schoolers aren’t being too subtle either, check out this guy:

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Nice jacket, real subtle dude

All in all, it’s an incredible festival with great music that’s run really well. If you love kicking off your shoes and wandering around a warm field listening to live music and drinking craft beer, you’ll love it at Austin City Limits. See you there in 2014!

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Click for the full size panorama

@ACLFestival
2100 Barton Springs Rd. Austin, TX 78704

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This Post Has 4 Comments

  1. ACL Festival

    Glad you had fun! We hope to see you again next year. #ACLfest14

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