Vancouver 2010 Surrey Torch Relay
byLast night the Olympic Torch Relay probably met its largest audience yet. Surrey opened their Celebration Site with the lighting of the cauldron by Daniel Igali, who ran the last leg of the day with the flame.
My sister said it was absolutely filled with people, which made it hard to see the events at times, but the kids had a blast and the place had a great vibe.
I was up at 4:30 this morning to do an interview with WNYC in New York and now I’m heading out to Surrey (with John Biehler) for the second leg of the Torch Relay out there. Since I’ll be following the relay in a GM vehicle, I thought I would pull my tweets into this blog post so that it updates in real-time. I’ll then have a full recap posted later today.
See you in Surrey!
Update: We had an amazing time on the torch relay. Children chanting “Go Canada!”, veteran Olympic spectators showing off their pins and swag from Calgary ’88, school groups with banners, flags waving, and a whole lot of spirit.
John took the following video along out route:
Here’s a slideshow of all my photos:
And here’s a slideshow set to music that I edited together hastily:
We rode behind the caravan of Coca-Cola trucks and the volunteer bus as it dropped torchbearers off at their starting locations. The relay would then follow behind us by about 10 minutes.
Hugs, laughter, and even a few tears — this was one of the most amazing Vancouver 2010 experiences for me and even describing it now gives me goosebumps. Way to go Delta and Surrey, you guys have a lot of spirit and it certainly showed.
Big thanks to GM Canada for inviting us along on the ride and to Art who has had an amazing journey across the country with this relay. 220 people make this thing happen every day and they’ve been at it for 103 days now. Cheers to the torch relay teams.
Some of the images are blurry as we were in a moving vehicle but I just couldn’t help but post them. You can view the rest of my photos on Flickr.
Update February 10, 2010 I wrote an article about my experience for BC Living Magazine online.
6 Comments — Comments Are Closed
lol love the photo of John taking your photo via the car’s mirror! Looks like you two had a lot of fun!
[…] know from experience it’s a great feeling when the Torch is touring your home city. You can read Rebecca’s blog post here and John’s post […]
After all the Surrey celebrations, VANOC was hard at work testing the large, 5 burner, glass and steel cauldron at the convention centre, AKA International Broadcast Centre. Check out a short video of THE flame (a huge flame per burner):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hX3dlnZVyc
OMG you drove right past me while I was ducking out of work to see the torch go through the neighbourhood I grew up in
Hey Becky,
Talk about connections….one of the runners from Ronald McDonald House, is my son THEO’s girlfriend…hard to believe hey, the little baby you were holding all those years ago. Had to laugh when I saw you’d covered this. Congrats on all your success, we need to get together next time I’m in Van, xo D
ps here is a link to our Torch Ceremony dance in Smithers, Cianna (above) is in this video too and two of our daughters.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI4cfHHHClI
Great photos and videos! We invite you to share them on TorchRelay.net (http://www.TorchRelay.net).