And finally, the trip is complete

Here's a few pics from the drive home. What a fantastic trip!

Here is the Peace Arch at the U.S./Canadian border. On the inside it says, "May These Gates Never Be Closed":



Ok, so we finally ate at Dick's, as we were coming back through Seattle. The jury is out with us, as to whether Dick's in Washington is better or not from In/Out Burger in California. I DO like the bathrooms better at In/Out. It was just an out-house for Dick's.



A view of Mt. Shasta from the side of Interstate 5:



This picture, the back of the veiwing stands, at Cypress Mountain was taken by Tracey. Look at the steps. It's about 5 stories high of stairs. And, yes, the bathrooms are ALL at the bottom.



Here's a great view of Whistler, taken by Tracey. We had to take the chair lift up and down the mountain.



One thing we discovered is that with all the hiking and walking that you have to do, with all the stairs that you have to ascend and descend, you really have to be a pretty decent athlete just to attend the games, let alone participate in them. We had a blast, although we arrived home completely exhausted!

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The last 4 pics are from the border:

Day 4 done

Today was just one event ... The Gold Medal Hockey game between the U.S women and Canada. The U.S. fans were far outnumbered, and far outcheered!

Here's some pics of the game:












Here's a pic from our suite's window at night. You can see the ski lights from Cypress mountain looming above the city in the picture:

Day 3 ... in the books

Wow, what a GRUELING DAY!! The day started around 5:00 am, and we didn't see the hotel again until almost 10:00 pm. We ordered room service when we got back because we were so exhausted. In the morning, we took the Olympic Bus to Whistler/Creekside for the women's Giant Slalom. Conditions on the mountain were pretty bad and just kept getting worse. We saw Lindsey Vonn crash in front of us, and Julia Manacuso get yellow flagged. It was pretty tough seeing both of them like that.

Finals got postponed until probably today, but we won't be able to attend, since we'll be at the women's Gold Medal Hockey game today between the U.S. and Canada. That's going to e exciting! Here's some pics of the activities on the mountain:







We left Whistler and headed straight to the Olympic Center to see the men's short track speed skating and the women's 3,000 meter relay. It was pretty amazing when the U.S. got beat so bad, yet still took the Bronze Metal because of the Korean DQ. Here's some pictures of the speed skating:























Finally, here's a picture out of our hotel suite's window. It's really amazing!!

End of Day 2 in Vancouver

So today we went to the first ever woman's Olympic ski cross event. The day started very early at about 5:15 am. We were so exhausted when we got to our hotel for the rest of the week that we didn't even feel like trying to make it to the awards ceremony. The Awards would have been great, but the event was even better. Of course we dressed for what we'd seen for the last 8 or 9 days on TV. And we froze our asses off.

We had a great time, though, except for me dropping one of my gloves in the port-a-potty. There are over 225 steps up to the seats. Not good for someone that has to pee at the drop off a hat (I have type 2 diabetes). My legs will definitely be in shape by the end of the week.

Here's the pics from today:

Day one ... we're HERE!

We made it into town last night. We started mapping out our plans for today, and the stupid GPS in the car was just killing me!

We did see this flag ...



and these rings ...





I'll post today's pictures later tonight. We're exhausted after our first real day of Olympic events.

WE MADE IT!

So we are in Richmond, British Columbia. It was a pleasant drive with no rain, despite all the predictions, even this morning that it would be raining. We stopped last night in Portland to visit some friends we haven't seen in a while, and dropped my sister-in-law off at her house in the Seattle area this morning.

Tonight we're staying at the Holiday Inn Express, and we'll move to the River Rock Casino tomorrow after ski cross.

We're off to do so some site seeing and figure out where we have to be tomorrow morning.

Got a message from Vancouver

They sent me an email stating that all the "standing room" tickets have been canceled for many events. Fortunately for us, all of our tickets are in the stands (translates to very expensive).

We'll have to see how this effects us, but I think it's going to make our experience a lot more fun not having to fight as big of crowds up on the mountains.

We have our tickets

Most of our tickets we'll pick up at "will call" at the hotel, but two of the events we purchased outside of the normal package and had those sent directly to us.

Getting around in Vancouver

We learned that you cannot drive to most of the events at the Olympics, but instead have to use public transportation to get to/from the events.

For the out-of-town events (Cypress Mountain and Whistler), you have to purchase tickets on the Olympic bus. For the local events, public transportation is free and runs constantly.

We have purchased our Olympic bus tickets and hopefully have all the transportation figured out now. Time will tell if that's true!

We're now looking at border crossing times. The time is expected to be hours at some times. This sent us into a panic, and caused us to alter our plans for driving up. We now have a reservation inside of Richmond, BC, and canceled the reservations we had in Washington state. This will allow us to take our time getting into Canada on Monday, Februrary 22nd, and not have to cross the border, very early on the morning of our first event. This is because we have to be at our pickup point on Tuesday by 6 am.

Getting the Event Tickets

We got the event tickets in a package. Apparently, all tickets in North America are sold through CoSports.com. The host country, Canada in this case, gets first dibs on tickets for several months, then the rest of the world gets their chance.

The tickets for each event come in a three tiered system ... economical, expensive, and Holy Cow!

All of ours in our package are in the "Holy Cow" bracket, which means they are fantastic seats. We would have been happy with just the "economical" tickets, but it is what it is.

The package came with 3 events over 2 days. We felt like we'd like to see just a bit more, so we added single event tickets to the Tuesday and Friday on each side of the package. This will make for an extremely busy week, but we'll have a couple days after we get home to recoup.