Olympics 2012 the back story

Welcome,

  I'm starting this blog to document and share my upcoming trip to the 2012 Olympics in London.

A little back story.  How did I get to the London Olympics?  Well, it all started when I studied abroad in college in Reading, England in 2003.  I enjoyed my time in England so much, I made it a goal to get back to the country as much as I could.  In 2005, London was chosen as a host city for the summer Olympics and I knew right then and there that I wanted to go.  Fast forward about 5 years.  I'm now out of school and in Wichita, and I knew I still wanted to go and knew it was time to start the planning.

1 + years leading up to the Olympics:

The real journey started in the spring of 2011 when the Olympics tickets became available to the public. This process was via application.  Each person applied for which tickets they wanted and in what price range.  By the end of May 2011, I found out that I was denied any tickets.  I didn't expect to get all of the 5 tickets I had requested, but I didn't expect to get none of them.  So the next step was that any of the people that were denied tickets were allowed a first come, first serve opportunity to get tickets on their website before the tickets were available to the general public.

Getting Event tickets:
Jump to late June 2011....I woke up and waited with multiple windows open on the website to be sure to maximize my opportunity.  I got in fairly quickly, but then the website quickly came to a slow trickle.  I could tell the website was crashing under the insane amount of traffic of Americans wanting tickets.  I did manage to get two events in my cart and pay for them.  Beach Volleyball and Diving.  Later that afternoon the website came back up and I was able to get a ticket to Athletics (also known to us Americans as Track and Field).  I was excited to get these tickets.  The Diving ticket was even to a medal's round.  I might have chosen some different tickets if the website hadn't crashed, but I'm super happy with the tickets that I was able to get.

The last year:
I've worked on planning the travel portion of my trip for the past year...well it's been longer, but actively planning for the last year.  When I was searching out flights, I found that one of the cheapest flights over to London was on Icelandic Air.  That was perfect, it gave me a wonderful excuse to stop in Iceland and see my friend Elin.  On top of that, a departure city that had Icelandic Air was Boston, and my friend Stephanie recently moved to Boston, so I thought...wow!...I could plan a trip to see 3 friends in one! So that was it.  I eventually booked flights from Wichita to Boston to Iceland to London and back.  I will have about 4 days in Iceland between the outward and return journey's, and a few days in Boston with Steph and then a lot of good fun time in England for the Olympics and seeing some friends that went to school with me. 

The last month:
Because I have literally been planning this since 2005 (in my head at least), it has been increasingly difficult to believe that it is actually going to happen.  I know that time is fading away, but it still doesn't seem real.  I leave in 1 week and I'm slowly getting things ironed out.  Thanks to my friend Duick, whom I'll be staying with for a while in Birmingham, I've got most of my travel plans inside the country figured out for game days.  I spent some time and got information from each of the different venue's that I'll be visiting and I should be well on my way.  Now, just to pack.  I haven't started, but soon I will be getting things put in a pile, and ready to pack.

  Now I have this blog and I will do my best to keep it up-to-date with entries about my time on my trip, my adventures at the Olympics and the individual Events and hopefully to post some pictures so you too can share in my experience, if you so choose.

Love