I got my tickets earlier this year after putting in a request with CoSport, the “Official Hospitality Services Provider for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games.” CoSport has done TicketMaster one better: they charge ridiculous handling fees without wasting those fees on frivolities like web servers. Nevertheless, I got tickets to two hockey prelims and to two curling prelims. It was easy to book trains from Seattle to Vancouver: even in business class, which I had to try, it’s only about $120 round-trip with no Olympic price-gouging.

The real toughie in going up to Vancouver: lodging. VANOC, the Vancouver Olympic Committee, has placed holds on 20,000 of the roughly 24,000 hotel rooms in the city. CoSport offered me a decent-looking hotel at $725 USD a night. I laughed at the offer and sauntered over to hotels.ca, which shortly within the 331-day booking window offered hotels for between $800 CAD and $4,500 CAD a night — and these were two-star hotels far from the city center.

From there I decided to get creative. Recent startup AirBnB made headlines by letting people rent out rooms or apartments to attendees of Obama’s inauguration, but their pickings are slim in Vancouver. The Zen Zone immediately rejected my offer to rent for $100 USD per night during the Olympics. The Funky BOAT is normally just $60 USD per night, but now it’s asking $500 USD to live on a boat in the middle of February.

Canadians are legendary for politeness, but homeowners have loonies in their eyes now. Vacation Rental By Owner (VRBO) lists dozens of places in Vancouver. Here’s a partial rate card for one in-city condominium on VRBO:

• Sep 15–Dec 18 .. $175/night .. $1000/wk .. $3200/mo .. (3 night minimum)
• Dec 19–Jan 04 .. $250/night .. $1500/wk .. (5 night min)
• 2010 Olympics (Feb 12–28, 2010).. $900/nt .. $5500/wk .. (14 nt min)

That’s $11,000 CAD you’d have to put up, at least, to be downtown for most of the Olympics. Other downtown properties are similarly crazy: Lux Suites will happily charge you as much as $24,500 for a month’s accommodation. That $800 CAD airport motel looked pretty good all of a sudden.

Fortunately, just outside of downtown is Kitsilano, a nice residential neighborhood just a bus ride from the venues. I found a few places on VRBO for $275 to $400 a night and snapped one up on the low end. (I tried using the less expensive properties to negotiate lower rates on the other ones, but during the Olympics the property owners have every right to tell me to piss off, eh.)

I have event tickets, train tickets, an apartment, and some valuable (!) American money to spend while there. All that’s left is for my traveling companion to get her passport!

(The map above is interactive. Double-click the left mouse button to zoom in, double-click the right mouse button to zoom out, and click any of the pushpins for details.)

In late June I’m going to Providence for my friend Meg’s wedding. The next day, instead of my original plan to return to Seattle, I board an Acela Express train bound for New York, meet up with my family at JFK Airport, and then we all depart for Rome. We’ll see Rome, Tuscany, and Venice, then go back to New York. I’ll be back in Seattle on July 5.

My whole family is excited for this trip, our first overseas vacation together. I decided to prepare for the trip the high-tech way.

First, Yahoo! Travel has really ramped up their offerings in the last couple of years. FareChase is a useful multi-site search site for airfares similar to the independent Farecast, only with more cities and fewer predictions. Yahoo! also has a trip planner that lets you plot out hotels and attractions. Here’s our trip plan. They encourage collaboration among users: other tourists can view reports of previous trips and compare notes. There is also a tie-in with Yahoo!-owned Flickr, which I use, to associate Flickr photos with Yahoo! Travel trip plans. Very snazzy.

My parents advised that I pack lightly since we might have to share a smallish hatchback for our trip through Italy. That was the last tip I needed to order a Kindle, the Amazon e-book device that’s been on back order since it came out last November. A few of my co-workers have Kindles and they’ve raved about theirs. I could have used one on my holiday trip to Hawaii: I brought 3 books with me and finished them all, so I ended up buying 3 more while there. That’s about 8 pounds of reading material that I had to lug home; by contrast the Kindle weighs 10 ounces and lets me buy books wirelessly, though its store only works in the U.S. I ordered my Kindle over three weeks ago and, if the Kindle forum is any indication, I won’t get mine until late April.

I also decided that my little point-and-shoot camera that has served me well for 2 years needs a big brother. I asked my photo-savvy friends to help me choose my first digital SLR camera. Half said Canon and half said Nikon, all due to personal preference. After spending a lunch hour at Ritz Camera trying out the Canon Digital Rebel XT and the Nikon D40 I placed an order for the D40. Its megapixel count is lower (only 6 megapixels versus 8 for the Canon) but its interface seems much more newbie-friendly. I also really liked the Nikon’s huge LCD screen since I expect to flip through photos with my family a lot while on vacation. After buying the D40 I started tooling around with it at home and in my neighborhood. Nikon publishes Digitutor, a web site with lots of handy multimedia guides to their cameras’ features. The D40’s manual is good but I ended buying a full-color “Digital Field Guide” to get more acquainted with the fundamentals of SLR photography. I hope to shoot like a pro when I get to Italy.

Lastly I’m trying to parlay my high-school Spanish lessons into conversational Italian. Last year, when my parents were first talking about this trip, I bought a copy of Barron’s E-Z Italian from a co-worker. Working through the audio CDs and the written exercises brings back a lot of memories of Spanish verb conjugation drills from years past. I’ve also bookmarked Caffe Talk, a lesson in ordering coffee in Italy. (The Italian caffe apparently operates a lot like an American bar or restaurant.)

Between Italian lessons, camera lessons, and waiting for my e-book reader to come in the mail, my weekends are pretty much booked from here on out to June!

Every time I see it I confuse it with the Barack Obama presidential logo, which I really love for its simplicity:

Coincidence or water polo association conspiracy?

It’s a decommissioned Titan missile base. You can buy it on eBay!

I really love unique homes despite their near-total lack of marketability. No one should ever buy a home because they want to live there, I’m told; one should only buy a home for the next person who lives there. After seeing endless “very unique condos” on the market, I would much rather have a truly unique home like LA’s famous Chemosphere than a unit in a building made to look cloyingly retro.

But back to the topic at hand: silo living. It is possible to make a below-ground missile silo into a livable space. Consider Silohome, a former missile silo in the Adirondacks that is now a home in an air park. The owners bought the site, constructed a 2000-square-foot home on the surface, converted the Launch Control Center (LCC) into a 2300-square-foot luxury home, and preserved access to at least the upper part of the “LLC” (whatever that is) where the missile once stood. The square footage numbers seem impressive though I’m sure the angles and shapes make decorating very difficult. One web site from 2001 claims that the home’s owners are “asking $2.3 million.”

Paying a million and a half for a missile base in Central Washington would only be the beginning. The site has electricity and water, but gas was trucked in — why entrust such a dangerous substance to a municipal utility? The owner is an eccentric gentleman named Bari Hotchkiss who bought the site around 1999 and previously offered it for about $4 million. Hotchkiss told KOMO-TV of Seattle that his site “is sort of like the Washington monument or the pyramids of Egypt.” According to a pseudonymous comment on BoingBoing, Hotchkiss is “convinced that with the right investment someone could put a multi-story destination resort on it. Pretty hilarious considering it’s in the middle of nowhere in central WA.” The nearest tourist attraction, Moses Lake, is about 40 minutes west on I-90 and the nearest metropolitan area is the Tri-Cities, more than an hour south. But who wouldn’t want an address that, according to Yahoo! Maps, is “Titan Missile Silo, Batum, WA”?

The next time we have a sunny day in Seattle, which won’t be until March, I’ll remember Hotchkiss’s pie-in-the-sky description of what one could do with a house in a silo:

if you chose to live in one or both of the Antenna Silos, you could retrofit the ANTENNA SILO – SILO DOORS – each weighing about 50 tons – with a new hydraulic opening system and then you could have your own push button 100-ton opening skylight. And if you really wanted to go whole hog, you could live in the bottom of one of the 155’ tall MISSILE SILOS and retrofit the 150 ton SILO DOORS so you could push a button and open them up – 155’ above the floor!!