It’s getting more and more difficult to get into Burning Man events these days.. especially the popular ones with capacity limitations. With Burning Man itself going through growing pains with their ticket lottery fiasco, this is leading to the regionals getting more and more popularity.
Overall, we love the spirit, and love connecting with the creative energy. We’re unlikely to make it to Burning Man this year and won’t even try to get a ticket. Which means, to get our fix – attending regionals has become a priority for us.
When we set sights towards Austin this spring, we actually hadn’t given Flipside much thought – until we were inbound and folks asked if that’s why were heading this way. So we put the word out there that we’d be open to attending, and wouldn’t you know it? Just a couple days later a pair of tickets were on their way to us.
Burning Flipside is Austin’s regional burn, and amongst the largest. They cap attendance at 2450, as going over 2500 subjects the event to mass-gathering regulations. We attended back in 2010, and loved the event. It’s large enough to get some really well formed theme camps and art projects, but yet small enough that everything is accessible. Plus, there’s shade trees and a river to swim in.
After getting our tickets, we discovered that quite a number of our friends in the area had tickets fall into their hands as well – which just ramped up our enthusiasm. Going to a burn event is already a welcoming environment, but having folks you already know just makes it all that much better!
For us, this Flipside was absolutely perfect for what we needed. We camped in the open area with a few friends, and not part of an organized theme camp. This gave us a quiet place to be, as we were actually working quite a number of hours on this custom iPad project we’re on.
Yes, we get flack about working while everyone else is on vacation – we just think it’s pretty darn cool that events like these can be just a normal day for us.
After our work hours, we’d enjoy hitting the burner thrift ‘store’ (in which everything is gifted) to pick up new-to-us-threads, mingle about connecting with friends, rafting the river, dancing the night away, watching fun performances (fire dancers, acrobats, singers, dancers, etc.), playing with melting ice sculptures and more.
But mostly we just soaked up being amongst community, creativity, passion and radical self expression.
Oh.. and fire. The effigy burn was amongst the best we’ve ever taken part of.
Thank you to everyone involved with Flipside for making this an awesome event!
Uggghhh the things we miss when we are on the road 🙁
Great posts and photos!
That’s kinda the rule of the road, eh? As much as we can be near cool stuff happening – we’re always away from other cool stuff too.
This looks like a ton of fun, even if it’s a regional! 🙂
It’s definitely a regional worth checking out!