Starting South by Southwest
I'm blogging from Austin. Why? Because I'm chillin' in my hotel room right now trying to recoup.
I left Thursday morning @ 6:00am on a flight to Austin with a connection to Dallas. My flight into Dallas was smooth, if a bit late, but that's fine. I was able to still catch my connection by running to the gate.
I boarded the plane @ 12:00pm in Dallas set for a quick hop flight down to Austin. And then the snow came.
The beginning of the snow as seen from the plane window.
Yes. It started snowing in Dallas, Texas. The same Dallas that has an average snow fall of 2.6 inches per year. This year that happened on Thursday between noon and 3:00pm.
In combination with the snow, the ground radar @ DFW was down for the day so they were having to direct runway traffic by sight from the tower. Normally this isn't much of an issue, but when there's a white out and you can't see 2 feet in front of you, it becomes one. The gates filled up quickly so we couldn't go back in and traffic was a mess so they couldn't even get us over to the de-icing pads, let alone take off.
So I was stuck. In coach. In a middle seat. On the tarmac. For six and a half hours.
The pilot was finally able to get back to a gate at 6:30pm and it was 7:00pm before I finally walked back in to the airport.
Everyone had their own gripes. Besides still being stuck in Dallas 7 hours later, mine was probably hunger. I ate breakfast before I took off from Seattle, but AA had no food, not even nuts, on the plane since it was meant to be such a short flight. The crew did their best to keep us comfortable stocking us with plenty of water ... but there's only so much you can do with water.
Since the airport had shut down all flights around 3:00pm and we didn't get back to a gate until so late it meant we were one of the last flights to unboard and of course by then every single hotel in Dallas and Fort Worth was completely booked. The rental car lobby was a zoo with lines of at least 50 to 100 people at every single counter.
The thing that saved me was a random conversation I struck up on the bus on the way to the rental car lot with some random girl from New York. It ended up that girl found a terminal where an SUV had just been checked back in and she was able to snag it. After she grabbed it I was the first person she came to asking if I wanted to hitch a ride down. We walked through and found 3 more people headed to Austin, filling the car as full as we could before we took off. One guy from Georgia, originally from Jersey was headed down for a rodeo. Another SXSW attendee came along. And the last was an incredibly nice lady who was trying to make it down to meet up with her sister and then to her mother's 80th birthday celebration, who apparently doesn't have much longer to live. Good conversation all around. Found a good burger joint 10 minutes outside of DFW and then 4 and a half hours later I checked in to the Hampton here @ Austin.
Its now 2 days later and I'm still without my luggage. Wearing the same clothes kinda sucks and I'd love to get my toothbrush. If everything is still not here by this afternoon I'll be doing a shopping spree at the local mall.
All is not lost however, the conference has been a blast so far. I've only hit up 2 panels, Zeldman's Respect panel and Naz's Design/Details talk. Both were good. Best of all it's been fantastic to meet up with old friends, hang out with people I've previously only known through teh internets and meet some new faces as well. I've already managed to get some serious partying in last night, which explains my stint in the hotel room recouping right now.
That's the circle thus far.