The Road To Here

I suppose the biggest motivation for starting a blog up at this particular time is that we're pretty much at D-Day in terms of finding out what tickets we've actually been lucky enough to win. Aside from the day I actually set foot in Vancouver, finding out what tickets we actaully win will probably be the most exciting thing about the whole process.

So with that in mind, a quick recap of what has transpired so far:

I suppose serious discussion regarding actually making this trip started sometime in the summer, when Cowie first committed to starting his Ph.D at UBC. That's certainly what got the wheels turning in my head in regards to how things might practially work anyways. I've always been a sports nut obviously, and a bit of a stereotypical Canadian in terms of sports at that, so obviously the Winter Olympics on home soil is a huge draw for me. I suppose in a way I'd been considering it ever since Vancouver was even awarded the games.

Starting back in September, pretty much as soon as VANOC released the information, Cowie and I started looking into the ticket packages and what we wanted to attend in broad terms. Hockey was obviously on the top of our list, but we both really wanted to see a variety of events. Curling, snowboarding, speed skating....basically the whole package. As a result of the number of events we wanted to see, our early budget estimates got blown out of the water pretty quickly. Talk of going for 'About $1000' in tickets quickly evolved into going for 'About $2000' in tickets and beyond.

Over the month of October, Cowie and I did the leg-work investigating the various OEPs and Single Events that we wanted to attend, and tried to figure out the best way of actually winning the tickets we wanted. Thats when we basically came to the realization that having four people on board was gonna be much better than just two. It made it easier to go after more events, and also greatly reduced the 'up-front' costs we might have been looking at. Enter Pam and Andrea.

Eventually we settled on a plan that I think all would agree was pretty solid. I think the big breakthrough came when, being the big planning nerd that I am, I was able to acertain which pre-lim hockey games would be Team Canada games. Using the IIHF's draw sheet, and cross referencing it with the 2008 Rankings, it was pretty easy to figure out what events to go for. I think that this basically formed the crux of our entire ticket packaging approach, as just about all the OEPs we went after had one of those preliminary games in it.

When it was all said and done, we divided our selected events into 3 packages. Pam, Cowie and I each threw in an application, covering everything that we were after. All told, we're in for a maximum of $10,024 dollars.

Holy crap....