We have our event tickets for the winter Olympics in February, one of which is on Saturday and the other is the next Tuesday. Unfortunately, we have no idea where to stay for 4 nights. I'm pretty sure all the major hotels in and around Vancouver are already booked solid. Even the ones that might have a some availability would cost an exorbitant amount of money - we saw a Best Western for over $300 a night. I don't really want to drive to and from Vancouver and go across the border every day either. Maybe we can find some hostels or something. I'd also like to just take Amtrak up there and back so we don't have a car to mess with in what will probably be a very crowded downtown Vancouver.

Anyway, I saw this article in the Seattle Times about the ticket sales and thought it was interesting. Here's an excerpt:

Because of high demand, most [prospective buyers] received only a fraction of the events requested, and many fans were shut out altogether. That prompted protests from Americans, particularly in Washington state, where about 40 percent of the total U.S. ticket requests originated from. Many U.S. fans had believed that proximity to British Columbia would translate into a larger share of the ticket pie for Americans.

I thought this was interesting too:

Because of record-high ticket demand in Canada, the original 48,000-ticket U.S. allotment for individual (non-travel-package) buyers was only about 3 percent of the Games' total 1.6 million tickets.

That makes me feel lucky we received half the tickets we requested. We just need a place to stay...