Headed To Austin for SXSW

I’m sitting in the Seattle Alaska Airlines lounge complimentary of my Lounge Club card.  I’m waiting here for my flight to Austin which I’ll be in for the next week to partake in SXSW.  I’ve heard great things about the conference/festival/party and decided I finally needed to go check it out.  I have been to Austin a number of times for work, and this one will be a lot like those, except in the evenings, I’ll be enjoying the life of SXSW.  One of the biggest perks to Austin though is seeing and catching up with awesome friends I have in the area.  Can’t wait to get back into Austin!

Since I had a number of things I wanted to do in Portland today, I decided to take the late flight which will get me into Austin around 5am (ouch).  Though red-eye flights are never fun, I’m thankful to be flying in style in first class from Seattle to Austin, and then from Austin to Portland on my way home.  I booked the flight using my American Airline miles (which I haven’t used for a while).  It cost me 50,000 miles and $75 for the RT in first class.  I won’t complain about that.  The nice thing is that I’ve got another American Airlines reward credit card that is going to get me another 50,000 points back into my account in a month or two.  Awesome.

I mentioned that Lounge Club card above.  Cool thing about it is that it came as a perk with my Ritz-Carlton credit card, but I canceled the card once they were charging me another $395.  I wasn’t getting the bonus miles and didn’t find it as valuable as the year prior, so I decided to let it go.  The Lounge Club has an expiration of February 2017, and since it worked today, I’m guessing I get to enjoy some free lounges for the next while.  I’m very thankful for that one.

Anyways, gotta run.

Source: austin-sxsw1.jpg (JPEG Image, 800 × 533 pixels)