Day 4 - Lance McGregor - what

Fun day today, another night shift for me. Ted had to work today so I had to travel overland using transit for the first time. Left the house around 11:15am to give myself lots of time to get downtown, however, it didnt take nearly as long as I thought, made it downtown by 12:30pm.

So I decided to check into the Village early and just sit in the beautiful warm sunshine and soak in some atmosphere for a while. I passed through security and checked in at the volunteer centre and got my first reward for completing my first shift (another pin for my collection).

I found a great bench in the plaza in front of the Salt building. The Salt building is a restored fish packing plant that looks like a big red barn. It has been totally transformed inside into this really cool lounge, rec room, vitamin bar and concert stage where the athletes can go to play pool, sit around and visit and listen to concerts at night. After the major performers play at BC Place for the medal ceremonies they will head over to the Salt building to perform for the athletes.

The sun was shining, it was about 14 degrees, and I just people watched for about an hour and a half looking at all the buildings and enjoying the view. The Athletes Village is absolutely beautiful with great architecture and it would certainly be a really cool place to live once the games are over. I was speaking with a realtor for the company selling the condo units and she advised me that the entire village was about 80% sold already. There was music coming from the mainstage in the International Plaza where a live band was warming up in preparation for the Welcoming Ceremonies today for Bulgaria and Lithuania.

2:00pm approached and I headed to the afternoon briefing and deployment meeting. The supervisors hand out color coded cards at this meeting to determine what area of the village we will be working at today. Once again I chose Team Welcome which means I was posted to the Welcome Centre - I like it there.

One of my first postings was out in the sunshine along the sea wall under the Granville Street bridge. A lot of the athletes have brought their bikes with them and go out for a ride along the sea wall. There is a check point where only accredited people can get through so my job was to check accreditations to make sure everyone who passed was allowed. I was there with an RCMP member and a fellow volunteer named Keith McGuire.

We started chatting and he asked where I was from. Normally when I say that I am from Armstrong the response is OH ARMSTRONG, HOME OF ARMSTRONG CHEESE, but for Keith he said: OH ARMSTRONG, SO YOU KNOW LANCE MCGREGOR. I thought this was hilarious. It turns out that Keith played lacrosse for Kelowna back in the 70s against Lance and was actually picked up by the Tigers to play in a Presidents Cup - so we yapped about lacrosse during our time together and had a great time enjoying the day.

Day four was a good day for celebrity athlete encounters. Today I met Patrick Chan our Canadian figure skating gold medal hopeful, the Canadian womens curling team, Haylee Wickenheiser, Manny Paradis and a bunch of other ski team guys plus a whole slew of Russian and Italian and Chinese athletes that I am sure are famous but I didnt recognize them.

At about 8:30 I was marshalling outside the Welcome Centre when I heard a huge explosion and then fireworks lit up the sky all around BC Place. Last night was the first dress rehearsal of the Opening Ceremony and at the end there is a massive fireworks show. I saw several helicopters hovering around during thattime and then today on the NBC I saw massive fireworks around BC Place on one of their olympic previews so they must have been filming to promote the ceremonies on TV. Word has it from an inside source that we will be blown away by the show as my inside source saw the sound and light check and said it was unbelievable.

My lovely supervisor Nancy recognized that I had a long commute home and at 9pm I was dismissed as no more buses of athletes were scheduled to arrive. Apparently the snow storm back East has delayed some of the athletes arrivals.

Tuesday is a day off for me so my next post will be on Wednesday night after my first morning shift and after I attend the Opening Ceremonies dress rehearsal.

Stay tuned.