200 days to go
The official countdown clock to the Paris Summer Olympics reached 200 days yesterday, Jan. 8. This means that in less than that amount of time I will be heading off to Paris for my fifth Olympic experience and my first Olympic experience in a city I have visited before. Prior to covering the Olympics, my travels had never taken me to Sochi, Russia, PyeongChang, South Korea, Tokyo, Japan or Beijing, China. While I now can say I have visited all of those places, long before I made my first Olympic trip, I spent a short amount of time in Paris. The year was 2001, shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. As a UNH graduate, I had gone back and played with the marching band for a few years as a post-grad and also continued to play in the pep band. The band director at the time, Tom Keck, announced that the UNH Marching Band was traveling to Europe and invited anyone who was playing in the band, so long as they paid their own way, to come along, opening up an opportunity to make...