vancouver 24 hours

GO CANADA GO!

I was making videos for Sun Media, writing for Vancouver 24 Hours newspaper, running around looking good because Canada Goose kitted me out… Van2010 was the best.

This was my final article.

I love how this was known around the wolrd as “The Party Olympics”.

Simultaneously, we set the record for the most gold medals ever won at a Winter Olympics. Sums us up pretty well, eh?

This was our coming out party, Canada!

It’s important to keep this patriotic momentum going; we’ve been humble for long enough about being the best country in the wold.

You know those times when you got goosebumps during the Games, or when your eyes welled up? When you were holding your breath and forgetting to blink while you willed us to victory?

That feeling, that’s the one that needs to be celebrated and screamed a little louder.

I don’t want to leave here. I want to live in this bubble forever.

Thank you Vancouver, for showing me the time of my life.

See you soon.
I’m so coming back.

xoxo,
Keri

(sidenote: kay woah – I don’t know where all my Olympic blog photos went, my heart is beating fast now, but pretty sure they’re around here somewhere… when that site got ported over to WordPress from SquareSpace it wasn’t easy. Sorry I’ll get to cleaning it up).

Anyway.

There’s much more I could tell you about this episode, but soon soon, because…

COMING SOON: The Canadian Explorer: Director’s Cuts

Here’s a good post I did here on KeriBlog about the Olympics last summer.

Last week, South Korea was awarded the Games in 2018. Good luck to them.

Let’s take a look back at ours last year. Many of these photos you’ve not seen, I’ll throw in a couple episodes, too.

The photo text is true; there’s almost no point to posting that photo. H U G E.

‘Irish House’ was out my window, where I lived.

Right in the middle of everything. Irish House was THE place, not being dramatic. They were collecting noise violation fines before the Games even started.

We’d hear ‘I Would Walk 500 Miles’, and ‘Small Town Girl’, three times a night minimum. Fortunately, by day 10 neither Mary or I could hear it anymore… that thing that humans have kicked in and tuned it out. Like the people who live beside train tracks.

Mary and me.

We’re at a club, my editor gave me tickets and said, take the night off.

Thanks to Mary is why my Olympics was as great as it was. I went out there, without a place to stay (no really – there was talk at my newspaper of some empty moved-out apartment, I had a towel with me, just figured I’d wing it all).

Mary offered her couch, I crashed onto it three days into the Games, then never left.

I thanked her by leaving a bunch of swag hidden around her house, including a cowbell in her freezer. Which she recently moved to her freezer … 5 provinces away, see it here.

I had this great morning routine going by the end… wake up, walk down to my coffee spot, pick up a paper along the way, read my article and eat a gingersnap cookie, back home and get online, and start working.

I was there representing Canoe.ca and, in addition to producing videos, I wrote for Vancouver 24 Hours. Read them all here. Third largest newspaper in BC!

“Social Keri”; I had not input there.

That backpack, my mobile studio – 22 pounds.

I was the only person at the paper, left to her own devices, not tasked with a story. Instead, I was expected to chase down and produce my own. Proud of that.

I met Carol Huynh on the Alberta Train. She’s our first ever Gold Medalist for Women’s Wrestling (2008). Click here for her podium moment when our anthem plays, very cute.

I don’t remember this photo being taken… at this point, I’ve been awake for 36 hours, filmed and produced two videos, and was en route to film a third.

This is Exploring Whistler Village, shot that day, I really like this episode.

I squished so much into three weeks, I didn’t stop.

There’s so many stories and behind-the-scenes stuff I could tell you, cue up another video series.