I'm writing today live from Vancouver, and all attention is on the Olympics- opening tonight. Oh wait, I forgot to mention that I'm in Vancouver, Washington. Located 250 miles south of the Canadian city, Vancouver, WA has had a long history of being confused with its more populated neighbor.
And, for the past few weeks, a number of people have booked hotel rooms here, thinking they were calling the British Columbia city.
The Hilton Vancouver Washington has also fielded Olympic enquiries and trained its reservations staff to be sensitive to the possible mistake and, naturally, turn it into a marketing opportunity.
"We absolutely want them to come here," Gerry Link, the hotel's general manager said, adding of the Vancouver mix-ups: "So far it has all been pretty good-natured."
To prevent any problems, the Hilton is also scouring its mid-February reservations and calling people who it fears might have booked rooms in the wrong country.
It's only natural that Washington state would be mixed up with the Games, anyway. We have the Olympic Peninsula as well as the Olympic Forest, so it's rather understandable. Meanwhile, residents are kind of fed up with the confusion, and are contemplating changing the name to Fort Vancouver. It's gotten so bad, a resident designed a t-shirt that reads ""Vancouver (not B.C), Washington (not D.C.), Clark County (not Nevada), Near Portland, Oregon (not Maine)."
Link (Photo: Esther Short Park in Vancouver, WA on Matt Downey's Flickr photostream)
And a heartfelt RIP to Nodar Kumaritashvili, whose tragic death I learned about after this post.