Tuttle 2 Texas - a railroad trip - Episode 1

Me at The Hideout in Austin, March 2009

"What might happen if a bunch of us chose to travel to SXSW by train this year?" That was the question I voiced on 3rd December 2009. We had just delivered an audacious piece of work. We, members of the Tuttle Club, a loose group of like-minded folk, drawn together by a common interest in social media and new technologies, had formed ourselves into a consulting team, sold some projects and got paid - everyone got paid something. We'd made money out of being ourselves, just adding a little bit of organisation. It felt like we could get away with anything - so why not do the thing that was next in my head?

I'd been to Austin for SXSW earlier that year for the first time. It was my first time in the USA ever. I loved it. I loved the America-ness of America, the quality of the Texas light, the bigness of the skies (even downtown in the city), the ridiculous play-money that is all the same size and you have to actually look at to know what you're paying out. So yes I wanted to go again, but now that we were really seeing what we could do together, I wanted to make a thing out of it, a project, a piece of art. How?

I did what I always do, I wrote a blog post. I said it out loud at the consulting event, yes, but then I went home and wrote it up and published it on the internet. Now it was not just the handful of people who'd been in the room, now it could be everyone.

I was also just starting a new phase of my life. I'd finished a fairly long-term relationship a little while ago and moved into a flat in London by myself. Just when I was getting used to and enjoying being on my own again, I found myself being drawn into a long-distance relationship over the internet, someone who lived on another continent (we had met in real life, just once, she'd been to Tuttle) who I knew almost entirely through the video platform Seesmic, twitter and her blog/podcast.

And so the trip started to become a thing, a project, an irresistable piece of art, something that I could not ignore and put aside, something that had to be done.