We were tourists today

No words required?























One of the many entertainment pods throughout the village. Note the groovy base drum....




















A comedy act in the village. Two tough hockey players on stilts. Hard to see but their numbers are 20 & 10 - 20's name is Witless and 10's is Luongolong. The referee was having a tough time controlling them.






Richard checking out a bobsleigh. His comment - not much padding in these things!

Debbie inside the Olympic rings at Whistler. Note the flowers and stuffed animals on the base - tributes to the Georgian luge athlete
The narrative begins....

Ah...sleeping in - that felt good! Actually, we were up by 8 a.m. but it still felt good to get up when it was light already. Richard did a couple of hours of office work - what DID people do before e-mail? I did laundry and tried to read a bit but kept getting absorbed in the Olympic coverage. Speaking of which - I'm thoroughly disappointed with the tone that CTV put on Jennifer Heil's magnificent silver medal. She did all she could and yesterday the American did that much better but CTV made it sound like Jennifer was a big disappointment. We could all see how disappointed she was but she was also very gracious. I was very excited for our other mogul competitor - bodes well for 2014 in Moscow.

We headed to Whistler just before noon. (Thanks to our hosts who dropped us at the bus hub instead of having to take the local bus.) We walked around a little bit before it really started to pour so we decided to duck in for lunch. Richard the optimist was right - he said that it would stop before we needed to go out again. The rest of the afternoon was sunny and very pleasant. We didn't even need hats or mitts. We checked out how to get to the luge event on Tuesday and wandered the village. The Olympic Store is humongous (spelling?) and is carrying quite the variety of clothing and other items. We visited twice - the first time was just to wander around and the second was a good place to watch the Canadian women skate the 3000 metre race. There are TVs everywhere - inside and out with the CTV coverage including commentary so you are never far from exciting moments. (By the way, it sure is nice being in the same time zone as the Olympics!)

On the bus trip to Whistler we had a nice conversation with a very pumped bus driver from Brampton Transit. He's having a blast. Been here since the end of January (for training) and will be here until just before the end of the Olympics. He's taken all of his vacation, lieu days and traded 5 shifts to be able to be here. He's handing out Brampton Transit pins to anyone who wants one and pens to drivers only. There are drivers here from all over Canada. Ditto for security - aside from the expected RCMP, we've seen officers from Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, and on and on and on. They are all in very good humour, love to chat but always looking around. Our venue is crawling with them and we're told that although we haven't SEEN them, our armed forces ARE there.

Dinner with our hosts tonight - lovely salmon.

Back to the venue early tomorrow - as I said in yesterday's post, finally a real race instead of just training. We are expecting 4 athletes in the Men's 15 km freestyle (also called skate for those who don't XC ski) - Alex Harvey (son of one of our best skiers in the 1980's - Pierre Harvey), Ivan Babikov (immigrated from Russia and can finally ski for Canada in the Olympics - in Turin he wasn't yet a citizen so he skied for Russia), George Grey (the 'old man' of the team - winner with Alex Harvey of a bronze medal at a World Cup here in 2009 - we were there!) and Gord Jewett (a Toronto boy who was a member of an independent ski team in Canada who stayed at our house for a Fall training camp - so if he does well, we can put up a plaque that say's "Gord slept here"! BTW we could do that for our guest room in Toronto since Beckie Scott slept there!) As mentioned, my assignment tomorrow will keep me away from the action but I hope I can get to the flower ceremony.