An Olympic Journey – Day 1
On Monday Feb 15, 2010 I was talking to my wife from work and she was stating how she’d really like to go to the Olympics in Vancouver. I had been flip flopping something fierce on whether or not to go, but her enthusiasm won me over. So we both set things in motion to head to Vancouver – the NEXT day!
Yes, we got all of our ducks lined up and we left early the very next day to spend a couple of days at the Olympics. Of course, when you leave it to the last minute like we did, you aren’t about to get any tickets. But that’s ok, we were going down to be part of the atmosphere that was all over Vancouver. We did look for something, but alas there was nothing available online. Or at least nothing that was reasonably priced for the 4 of us to go down. Who cares? We were going to the Olympics!
So we headed off at an early hour Tuesday morning. By Tuesday evening we were in Richmond and heading over to one of the Olympic Celebration sites: the Richmond Ozone!
To say our first experience at the Olympics was an enjoyable one would be a HUGE understatement.
We wandered around the huge site to get the lay of the land and then picked where we wanted to go first. We headed to the BCLC Dome and stood in line so we could get our “official” athlete badges and then we went and did “virtual” biathlon.
After completing our “competition” (Shannon hit more targets than I did for the record), we went over to the “Training” facilities (yeah we did it backwards) and Kaleigh did some work on the balancing ball.
While there, the girls got to meet 2008 summer Olympian Carol Huynh. Carol won the gold medal for Canada in wrestling. What is really neat about Carol is that she is from Hazelton, a VERY small community near Smithers – a few hours drive west of Prince George. She said she was pleased to meet some people who knew where Hazelton was and had actually been there! The girls spoke to her, got an autographed card and posed for a picture with Carol holding her gold medal!
After having some fun with Carol and checking out the future plans for the Richmond Oval (that’s going to be one neat facility), we went over to the outdoor rink to see people skating. We didn’t bring our skates so we were out of luck in participating, but it was still neat to see.
Shannon, having spent a year in Holland as an exchange student, was excited to see Heineken House being part of the Richmond Ozone. However, at night it is for only those over 19 so we couldn’t go inside this day, but we would be back! For now, we just had to get the picture of the outside of the building and be content with that.
After that it was getting late and so we had a bite to eat and listened to some music on the stage and watched some figure skating on the big screens. Kaleigh was really excited with the Ugandan dance and music performance. It really got her pumped up.
We went for a bit but then it had been a long drive down and we had a busy day planned ahead of us. As such we called it a night at about 8:30pm and went back to the apartment for some much deserved rest.
