Getting Ready

Once we had the tickets, we began planning our trip, including hotels and travel. Dawn and I looked at all of the websites for a hotel. It was pretty amazing to see the minimum prices ($350 or more per night) and the minimum stays (sometimes up to 28 days!). We considered staying in The States and driving up each day, but we were concerned about the border crossings and travel times. We reserved rooms for Sunday night and Tuesday night just across the border in South Surrey.

The months passed...Jen began really getting into the Vancouver 2010 website and everything Olympic and Vancouver. Sometime in that time, I began affectionately referring to Vancouver, B.C. as 'The Upper Couv' since Vancouver, WA is affectionately referred to as 'The Couv' around Portland.

In one of her forays into the website, Jen found a fan-to-fan forum for ticket sales, and we started thinking about Monday options. Jen got really excited and reserved a hotel, this time in Langley. If we were unable to get event tickets, we decided that we could just hang out in The Upper Couv.

When I got back from The Dominican Republic in December, there was a special package waiting...Olympic Tickets!



Aren't they beautiful?



Curling...



and bobsleigh...

An Olympic Dream

I have been watching the Olympics for as long as I can remember. My first memory tied to the Olympics was when I was three years old. We were visiting my grandparents in Montana; it was cold and icy. For some reason my dad took me out to ride a horse. We were in the corral. Thunder was a big, not tall, black horse. He would have been a stocky muscle man if he were human. So my dad put me up on Thunder, just behind the saddle. Then my dad went to get on the horse. In the 30 seconds or so between lifting me onto the horse and hoisting himself up, my dad forgot that I was there. He swung his leg over, hooked me, and off I tumbled onto the icy, frozen manure covered corral ground. Like I said, Thunder wasn't a tall horse, so I didn't fall too far. I don't remember getting back on the horse and riding, but I'm sure we did. What I do remember is going into Grandma and Grandpa's house to warm up, AND watch the Olympics. That was the year Dorothy Hamill won a gold medal in figure skating and I thought she, and that, was about the coolest thing ever. I was sure I could do the Hamill camel and all of her other jumps and spins.

Ever since that day, I have dreamed of seeing the Olympics in person. In 1988, our family talked about going to the Calgary games, since they were 'close', but we didn't make it. Then, we were definitely going to go to Salt Lake in 2002, but we didn't make it again. In the summer of 2008, my niece, Caroline, was talking with her mom and me about the Vancouver games and how cool it would be to go. She had already done some investigating and knew that the ticket sales lottery opened up in October of that year. As we were talking, I said, "so, if I enter the lottery and get you a ticket, are you definitely in? You will come up from Santa Barbara for the Olympics?" She said yes.

In October I started looking around to find out about the tickets. I found the website. I was with my best friends, Cookie and Jen, and we found the ticket site and information about the lottery process. We could only try for 8 tickets to events, and if awarded, our credit cards would be charged immediately. Allison had already told me that he was in for the fun, and Mom and Dad too. We began looking at events and times. I recommended curling, since I had become a fanatic of curling with my mom from the time it was an exhibition sport a few olympics ago. I think Jen barely knew what it was at the time and thought it looked boring, but she went along with it. So, we entered the lottery. We had high hopes. We asked for 8 tickets to events on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.

In January 2009, I received an email--we had been awarded tickets! Yay!!!! We were awarded 8 tickets for curling on Sunday and then 4 tickets for bobsleigh on Tuesday. Then it was time to plan our trip!