As in years past, I had the opportunity to shoot Austin City Limits in October this year.  In other years I always opted to fly out to Austin and stay in a hotel.  This year I decided to do a big solo road trip and sleep on a friends couch (David Brendan Hall Photography).  It was a TON of driving, a TON of alone time, and utterly exhausting.  I don’t regret it in the slightest.  I broke the trip up into two parts: driving east and then driving west and south as  I took a detour on the way back (more on that later).  This first part took me through the Saguaros in Arizona, White Sands in New Mexico, and Marfa TX.  And then a ton of nothing in between.  I slept at a friends in Tempe, at a motel in NM and in a safari tent (pictured below) in Marfa.  I ate a bunch of meals out of my cooler consisting of hard boiled eggs, avocado, cucumber, cheese and crackers.  And I hate to admit it but I also found myself at a bar in a Chili’s eating a salad and drinking a Coors Light (hey, it happens).  I also made a couple of pour over coffees on the road with a camp stove.  I usually save playlists on Spotify to listen to offline but this trip I decided to dig out all of my old cd’s that I still own from the top of my closet.  Lots of great friends albums from the last decade were played on repeat.  I love how music brings back memories from another place and time and doing this allowed me to relive so many memories and really think about how far I’ve come and how much I’ve evolved over the last decade.

I went to Iceland with a good friend for just over two weeks in April/May of this year.  I made some new friends, saw otherworldly views, swam in freezing waters and boiling hot pots, pet beautiful horses and followed some reindeer, drove entirely around the island, got stuck in a snow storm in the north in a cabin for two days, sat in a bar drinking with a couple of Brits for several hours one night, climbed a lighthouse and walked behind a waterfall… this list can go on and on but hope that gets some of our experience across.  It feels like a dream and I’m already ready to go back.