My Road to Rio: Getting There

About three weeks before the Olympics began this year, I discovered that all remaining unsold Olympic event tickets had been opened to the public. When I could not obtain any Rugby Sevens tickets through CoSport, the only official authorized ticket reseller for Olympic tickets in the US (read: the only way to get tickets with a US address), I was *finally* able to score tickets to the men's rugby placing matches, including the semi-finals and finals through the Rio 2016 website. This was the main event I wanted to see, and years ago I told myself that if I could get tickets to see the first time Rugby (Sevens) was played in the Olympics, I would go to Rio. So then I had a choice to make. I hadn't been planning to attend the Olympics this time around. I already went to London in 2012, and I really just wanted to see rugby. And now, it was actually possible!

Flights

My brother in the GIG Rio Airport
right after we landed

So with the idea that maybe this could work, I went online to look at flights. There is absolutely no way I would ever have been able to afford a monetary ticket to Rio during the Olympics. Flights were pricing in the thousands! However, the mileage flights were not bad. Of course, this close to the event, there were no saver level redemptions available, but I was able to find an "anytime" economy fare for 55,000 miles each way. And thinking that I didn't want to go to Rio alone again, and not knowing many others who also collect miles like I do, I called my family in Hawaii to invite them to come with me since it was exactly the same price in miles to fly to Rio from Honolulu as it was for me to fly there from Salt Lake City. In the end, after a little convincing, my little brother decided to come with me. He had not been to South America before, and aside from visiting family in Thailand, he had not traveled outside of the US. It definitely depleted my mileage stores, but it was so worth it to use my miles on my family! This was the first time I would be traveling internationally (minus Thailand) with someone from my family, and it was so exciting!

Little bro and I at Copacabana Beach

Events

Once I had a few flights on hold, I was SO excited to pore over the remaining available tickets and see what other Olympic events I could take my brother to see. We ended up with tickets to two rugby events (which amounted to 10 matches!), one beach volleyball event (with one men's and one women's match), and one badminton event. I'll summarize the events in my next blog post since there was SO much to take in there! Aside from the Olympic events, we spent the rest of our time eating delicious Brazilian BBQ, walking around Copacabana Beach, and sitting in traffic getting to and from Corcovado to visit the Cristo Redentor statue (the Christ Redeemer statue) for some of the best views of the city. I was sad that we weren't able to hang glide over the city, something I have wanted to do for a while now, because they closed the air space over the city during the Olympics. Which is probably for the best.

Accommodation 
After putting the flights on hold and picking out which sporting events we wanted to see, the next obstacle was finding affordable accommodation. In London, there was an official Olympic "Camp in London" site, mostly for volunteers, where you could pay 10 pounds a night to set up a tent one Tube station away from the main Olympic park. There was nothing this affordable in Rio this time around, and unfortunately booking so close to the event made finding affordable housing difficult. Even my friends who live in and around Rio were not going to be there during the Olympics. So I turned to my favorite hostel booking website, Hostelworld, to find hostels in convenient locations knowing that prices were 3-4 times their normal price. We ended up booking a stay at the CabanaCopa Hostel located around the corner from the Cardeal Arcoverde Metro Station, the closest metro station to the Beach Volleyball Arena on Copacabana Beach. Normally, a night at this hostel will set you back around $10 per person. We paid over $40 per person for each night during the Olympics, but it was still much cheaper than any other hotel or airbnb I could find so last minute in the right locations with decent reviews. I believe everyone should stay in a hostel at least once, for better or for worse, before they're 30, just to have that experience. And it was my brother's first hostel experience, so I was excited for that. It ended up not being so great since the crowd it drew for the Olympics was much different than the typical hostel crowd in South America that I'm used to. But there we didn't spend much time there anyway, and there was a decent free breakfast! Plus, we got to see monkeys on the property!

Having the flights, accommodation, and events worked out, I pulled the trigger and decided to go to Rio for a weekend of fun Olympic shenanigans! Stay tuned to hear about my spectator experience in my next post!

The view as we left the Beach Volleyball Arena (to the right) with the Cristo Redentor
statue appearing (on the left) over the Copacabana Beach skyline.