Our flight was set to leave at 7:05am out of Gatwick London so that meant dragging our asses out and getting on the 5:30 shuttle from the hotel. All was well, we made it on time, the easyJet checkin was quick and painless and the plane was half full, so it was fairly comfortable. Takeoff was about 20 minutes delayed, but fortunately for Jamie's itinerary that time was made up before we landed. Not bad for a cheap flight.

We ran into some Canadians in the terminal at Milano Malpensa and talked a bit while Jamie looked for the car rental place. It turns out they were destined for the Womens gold medal game – since Canada was a shoe-in.

Jamie came back unsuccessful, and then I pointed out that we were in terminal two and all the car rental call-boxes said terminal one. We hopped on a shuttle and found the car within our alloted one hour. We were off. In our rocket powered Fiat Punto. Ok, so it was far from rocket powered. Maybe it had two gerbils running inside, one of which was dead, but we were off.

With Jamie behind the wheel and Fraser navigating, we managed to find our way to the hotel, the Holiday Inn Assago, fairly quickly and get checked in without a problem. And without delay we were off again in attempt to catch the 1pm train to Torino. Again, flawless execution on navigation. We located one of the craziest parking spots ever, and managed to get the car in safely. We had enough time to eat too. We polished off a couple of bottles of vino and ate some yummy food at a pizzeria (was there any doubt?) and carried on.

We made the train, and got a bonus. We were told we could get on either the raggidy ass piece of shit train, or the EuroStar ETR500. A piece of us all thought the ES would cost more but we got on it anyways. This bad-boy hits 300KM/h on the countryside and makes the cars on the motorway beside us look like they're standing still. Not to mention the free Coffee, yum.

We hit Torino about 40 minutes early, stepped outside the train station and said now where? Having absolutely no directional bearings we decided to find a cafe and get some cappuccino. Torino, being in Italy, there were a cafe within a block. We parked, and ordered “Quatro Cappuccini!” as the old man laughed at us. After downing a couple each at € 1.10 a piece, we were golden and moved on. Of course, our attempt at figuring out which way north was failed, so we headed the block back to the train station to seek out information.

Seeing as there are Canadians everywhere, we ask a couple of cute girls if they know where the Palasport Olympico is. They didn't, but they claimed it was 40 minutes walking. Don't ask how you can not know where something is but have a time estimate. That was ok. We asked a couple of Polizia and they told us what bus/tram lines to get on to get there and as we were walking towards the tram stop an Aussie, Craig, approached us and asked us if we were headed towards hockey.

We weren't, but we were looking for the arena for tomorrow. He let us in on some good information: the buses are free. That answered our travel issues in town anyways. As it turns out Craig was going to the Womens gold medal game.

After about 10 minutes on a tram, we found the Palasport and wandered around. The flame was burning at the Stadio. It was a sight to see, all it's glory, reassuring us that we were in fact at the Olympics.

As we walked around the area we were approached a couple of times by scalpers (evil beings) and asked if we wanted tickets to the Womens gold medal game. We weren't really interested at that point, but then something just kinda clicked. The next one that stopped we asked how much; he claimed face value of €140 but we weren't about to blow that much. We carried on.

As we got around to the box office we ran into the two cute girls that didn't know where the Palasport was, we waved and stopped out front of the box office. They asked us if we were going to the game, and suddenly our answer had shifted to “we're thinking about it.”

Before we knew it our thoughts had changed into action; checking for ticket availability. Shortly followed by a check of Jamie's itinerary. We had a train at 11:20, game should be over at 10:30, no problem.

We got the tickets. The most spontaneous, insanely crazy, chance of a lifetime event was happening right now. This calls for a celebratory bottle of Vino, or three since there was time to kill before the game. We hit a cafe a few blocks away. When we arrived we were the only Canadians. Before we left, the place was a sea of red & white. Most of which were going to the came, some of which just saw Canadian content and decided to come in for a drink.

As we meandered back towards the Palasport for the big game, we stumbled upon a TSN crew about to do something with Bob McKenzie, so we interrupted and took a picture with him just for kicks.

The crowd was thickening with red and white. Only a few sparse others neutral fans and the occasional stripe of blue and yellow were present. Clearly the house was going to rock and rock the way the Canadians want.

The inside was buzzing, it was electric. The chants began early; the roar of the crowd erupted when the teams took the ice for warm-up. This was what we came for, a day early.

It didn't take long for Team Canada to take and hold the lead throughout the game, but the Swedish fans were in high spirits throughout the match and just happy to have their team there.

Once the game ended and Canada was the victor, we had to move. As we were walking out Conor decided to check the actual train schedule, and found out to our surprise that the train leaves at 10:50; a nice 30 minutes sooner than Jamie's itinerary had stated.

We had to run.

We were running out of the Palasport complex when suddenly a camera light came on. It was CTV National, they wanted to interview us. We stopped, interviewed for a couple of minutes, and resumed running. We hopped in a local taxi told him pronto! And authorized him to break any laws necessary to get us to the train station within 8 minutes.

We made it just barely as the last doors were being closed.

Good times.