kartooner

It’s hard to describe the jour­ney from New York to Austin, TX, mainly because it wasn’t quite how I imag­ined it would be. In my mind, I would’ve boarded the plane on time, with a few min­utes to spare. I would’ve landed at the Austin Inter­na­tional Air­port, grabbed my cobalt blue duf­fle bag, rented the car I had made a reser­va­tion for and drove to my hotel with­out get­ting lost.

You might have guessed where this is going, but, it was unde­ni­ably more com­pli­cated than what I just described. Rather, my flight was an hour delayed, my lug­gage went miss­ing for close to 2 hours and well, I got lost. Despite look­ing over the maps and con­vinc­ing myself that I was going to go from Point A to B with­out any trou­ble or con­fu­sion, it ended it being a fran­tic trip buzzing in and out of Texas traf­fic and finally after a des­per­ate call to the hotel I finally found the place.

The redeem­ing fac­tor in all this was going out to din­ner with Matthew Oliphant, Anton Peck, David Thomp­son (who has a slick ‘Hitchcock-esque’ logo), Will Pâté and Steve Mar­shall. Prior to com­ing out here I had only heard of (or seen the work of) Anton Peck and Will Pâté through mutual friends and col­legues. Already, I feel like I’ve made a few new friends and SXSW hasn’t even “offi­cially” started yet.