After two years of anticipation, South by Southwest Interactive has come and gone and I’m back home, adjusting to Greenwich Mean Time and a boatload of actual work.

Jeremy has always said that nothing can really compare to your first time at South by Southwest—so, did the conference live up to the hype my second time around? Well, yes and no.

Things got off to a very shaky start: We landed in Dallas in the middle of a snowstorm which subsequently caused all flights to Austin to be cancelled until the following day. To cut a very long story short, thanks to Twitter, Jeremy and I were able to catch a ride from Dallas to Austin in a golden van rented by the lovely Erin and Peter (thank you again, guys). Our luggage was not so lucky, however, so my first two days in Austin were spent wearing the clothes I had flown over in. Yum.

As it happens, I spent those same two days largely confined to bed with what felt like the flu, so it didn’t really matter what I was wearing. I can’t remember the last time I consumed so much Dayquil or felt so dreadful from head to toe. It was really not fun and certainly not the way I had envisioned spending the opening days of the conference.

Eventually our bags arrived, the worst cold symptoms subsided, and things started to look up. But even then, I found this year’s SxSW a bit…funny. I’m going to attribute it to the fact that 1) there’s probably no way the conference could have lived up to two years’ worth of expectations on my part, and 2) even after I shook the flu symptoms and emerged from quarantine, I just didn’t have the energy to throw myself into the thing whole-heartedly.

After my first year at SxSW, I was really fired up about everything: about all the great people I had met, the exciting stuff I had learned, the cool things that were going on in the online world. I was so inspired that I found myself wondering what it might be like to switch professions and become a full-time Web geek (that was just a fleeting thought, however; words are my passion, not code, and I’m no designer).

This year, while I saw some interesting panels, only one (The Web That Wasn’t) had me frantically scribbling notes so that I could remember all the fascinating ideas that were discussed. As for the parties, even the nice ones just left me feeling overwhelmed as soon as I stepped in the door, and I had almost zero tolerance for trying to hold shouted conversations while being buffeted by people on all sides. I felt like a bit of a lame-o heading back to the hotel early every night to curl up with Cryptonomicon while (most) everyone else boogied the night away, but I just couldn’t do it. And the one night I did stay out later than I really wanted to, I had a migraine by the time I crawled into bed. That’ll teach me.

It’s not that I didn’t have a good time; I had some really great times. But what I enjoyed the most were not the panels or the parties, but the nice leisurely lunches and dinners I managed to have with old and new friends. I far preferred going for an intimate meal with a smaller group of people than trying to make connections among hundreds of people at a loud party. Maybe it was just my general lack of energy, or maybe I’m just turning into an old curmudgeon—whatever the case, my fondest memories of this year’s SxSW are of friendly conversations over really good food.

But for all the ups and downs this time around, I reckon I had more fun being there than not being there, and I’ll definitely be back next year.