By OnMilwaukee Staff Writers   Published Mar 19, 2011 at 4:15 PM

Austin, Tex.--When the alarm sounded Saturday morning no one wanted to acknowledge it.

Not because it sounded the end of their South By Southwest stay. After three days of navigating blood boiling traffic and zipping all across town playing and watching shows the band was ready to head home. But thanks to a late night at the Sub Pop Records showcase and the unfortunate scheduling of a Saturday night show in Lawrence, Kan. Jaill was looking at making a 10-hour-drive on about 3 hours of sleep.

"This is when touring get's fun," said a bleary eyed Vinnie Kircher, the band's singer, after an early morning raid of the hotel's unappealing continental breakfast.

When last we checked in with the Milwaukee indie rock trio, they were spending a quiet afternoon getting set up with free swag from the many corporations that flock to the sprawling film and music fest.

The band had no shows of their own scheduled Thursday, and with temperatures in the 80's the band indulged in an afternoon swim at the hotel. Judging by their extreme paleness it looked to be their first dip of the season.

With hundreds of shows going on at any given moment during SXSW it can be difficult to decide what to see.

And after driving downtown and parking the van about a mile away we descended into the madness to see what we could find. After leaving Vinnie with his girlfriend, who flew down for the weekend with friends from Milwaukee, we wandered aimlessly for a couple hours.

After recognizing one of the guys from Summer Twins, a band Jaill had played with at the Burger Records showcase the day before, sitting outside of a bar we ducked in to see hat was going on.

It turned out Conspiracy of Owls-- a band Jaill is friends with from Detroit--was playing the free show, which took place on an upstairs patio deck where blaring techno music from the club washed over the bands sets.

Like I said, it's nearly impossible to follow any semblance of a plan at SXSW. But we had a lot of luck just talking to people about what they were seeing and following word of mouth leads. After Conspiracy of Owls wrapped up we decided to head out to a bar, coffee shop and music venue called Spider House where everyone we talked to seemed to be headed that night.

Jaill kept running into friends from other bands from across the country, and the cheap margaritas came one after another. Surprisingly everyone you met seemed to know something about the Milwaukee music scene, whether talking about a time they'd played the Cactus Club, their affinity for Kevin Meyer's Dusty Medical Records label, or praising any number of bands past and present, the Brew City love abounded.

Again and again at SXSW you'd see people's early evening fatigue from the accumulative effects of the festival's long days and nights slowly give way to unhinged drunken madness and by the time King Tuff took the stage with their cranked up party rock people had taken to stage diving and hurling full drinks into the air.

We had agreed to drop a friend off downtown and when we finally made it back to our hotel it was well past 3 a.m.

Another amazing aspect of SXSW is that a lot of the bands you have to stand in line to see at clubs downtown will end up playing random less advertised shows everywhere from houses to bike shops.

Jaill's buddies at Burger Records had scheduled an afternoon backyard show at a house far away from the mess in the city and people gravitated to patches of cool shade in the grass. Jaill played to a small but enthusiastic crowd before loading up and shooting back downtown for their biggest show of the weekend the Sub Pop and Hardly Art records showcase. We found out later the house show was busted by the cops soon after we left.

Bands alternated sets between an indoor and outdoor stage at a club called Red 7. Jaill played early and by the time they finished the club was nearing capacity. For the rest of the night people from the crowd walked up to introduce themselves and tell the guys how much they enjoyed the show.

And bass player Andy Harris had his own fan moment when he met cult radio personality Nardwuar, who chatted him up on Wisconsin's musical history and asked the band to be on his show this summer.

Kircher introduced himself to comedian Eugene Mirman, one of the talents behind the new animated show Bob's Burgers on Fox and had a geek out moment of his own when J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. fame walked past.

The label folks kept plying the band with drink tickets and sets from Dum Dum Girls, La Sera, Hunx and His Punx, J. Mascis and others kept them from leaving. By the time we left the club 3:30 a.m. Was staring us in the face.

Vinnie disappeared momentarily as the show let out and returned with four monstrous BBQ sandwiches . We sat on the curb as the non-stop sea of people flowed past, savoring one last taste of Texas and knowing that tomorrow was going to hurt.