Photo of the Closing Ceremonies by Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times

The Seattle Times sent 15 staff members to cover the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, and they worked for 17 days to capture various angles in their blogs, videos, photos, columns and tweets.

Reporting from Whistler, Vancouver, inside the 11 venues and outside in the host-city's streets, we each came away from the Games with unique memories and experiences.

Here are some of our favorites:

I can't leave the Olympics without paying a brief tribute to my home-away-from-home, the main press center (MPC) in downtown Vancouver, B.C. This is a place where journalists worked, ate, socialized and sometimes slept. It's where the press maneuvered to get tickets to high-demand events like ice skating and hockey; where they sat often in the same place hour after hour, day after day. And when the days started to blur together, you'd wonder if some people had ever left at all.

It's where information was constantly pumping in and out from live feeds of the events across Whistler, Cypress Mountain and Vancouver; where there is a 24-hour McDonald's that was built in one day, according to an Olympic volunteer. It's where all the outlets worked, the internet connection was ridiculously fast and dozens of TVs carried all the Olympic events live.

It's where you'd hear occasional explosions of exasperation, as in "@&#^& Twitter!" presumably when someone's twitter update had beaten someone else's story. It's also where you bumped into colleagues, past and present and where strangers would approach you to trade your Olympic pins.

It's where deadlines were met, or not, and where you could go to get information on anything big or small. It's first place you checked in and often the last place you left. While many might have stayed so long as to be sick of the sight of it, it still where you showed up everyday. It was press home.

Here our some of our favorite staff shots:

Producers Genevieve Alvarez, Tiffany Campbell and I have a problem: we're addicted to our iPhones. And thanks to an international plan, nothing changed once we crossed the border.

In order to turn our mobile obsession into something positive for this blog, we set up a Google Map that automatically plots where our iPhone photos are taken.

Zoom in, click around and check back throughout the games for the latest photos from Vancouver and Whistler:

View Seattle Times Olympic Outsiders in a larger map

Submitted by Jim Jeffreys and Suna Gurol

Suna entered this picture on Saturday night in a Facebook contest run by the International Olympic Committee. The prize: two tickets to the Closing Ceremony.

On Sunday morning at 10:30 a.m., we received a phone call from a nice Swiss IOC member named Alex informing us that Suna had won the tickets, provided we could get to Vancouver by 3 p.m. to pick them up. After about 15 minutes of panicking and, in retrospect, somewhat randomly running around the house, we got ourselves together and hit the road.

Submitted by George Liu

My brother and I left our hotel at 10:30 a.m. to look for a suitable place from where to watch the men's ice hockey gold medal match-up. Every sports bar that we passed had a long line in front, and people had started to line up at 8:00 a.m. for a competition that was scheduled to begin four hours later. The situation at LiveCity Yaletown, where I had watched the Opening Ceremony on a huge projection screen two weeks earlier with several thousand Olympics fans, wasn't any better. The line stretched for at least three blocks, and the venue personnel said that it would take a person at least an hour and a half to get inside LiveCity, because everyone was subject to a security screening.

Submitted by Katrina Thompson

Saturday was a very long day. I was at work at 7 a.m., but there weren't any reports dues out until later in the day.

I have been very lucky to work with a really great team of people. We come for all over the world—Japan, Canada, the UK, and of course the U.S. We come from many backgrounds—students, an attorney, an artist, a published author, a snowboarding instructor, petrochemical engineer and retirees. Realistically, we have very little in common, other than wanting to be part of the Olympics and having the Olympic Spirit! I never thought that making copies could be so rewarding!

On Saturday, I just could not leave. There was a really great energy in the Village and in our offices. The U.S. bobsleigh team had won gold, ending a 62-year medal drought. The team was having a press conference in my building! I was lucky enough to be able go downstairs to watch and listen to the team speak about their experiences and winning the medal. What a great bunch of guys! After the press conference I was lucky enough to have my picture taken with Steve Holcomb—he even let me hold the medal. Amazing!

As much as I have missed my friends and family the last few weeks, I have really enjoyed this experience. It's been hard, but rewarding. So, Seattle, until London 2012.

Submitted by Tom Brown

We had the pleasure to spend several days up in Vancouver (second weekend) with our condo a half block from Robson Square. We learned that Canadians are the friendliest people on the planet. On Saturday we had the opportunity to walk the downtown streets taking in the Olympics experience. Even though we were decked out in American gear with an American flag draped around us, everyone was extremely polite and friendly. They bought us drinks, food, and actually pointed us to the shortest ways to get to our venues.

However, things changed on Sunday (Feb. 21) when Team Canada played Team USA in a preliminary hockey game. I have never seen such dedication and passion from fans before, even more than NASCAR fans! We were treated as the enemy on foreign soil.

Thanks to a red-carpet spot at Club Bud in downtown Vancouver, my experience as an inexperienced figure skating interviewer has come full circle.

Two-time Olympic medalist Michelle Kwan talked to us on her way into the Budweiser/Under Armour party Friday night. In the video below, she explains her favorite moments of the 2010 Winter Games as well as the future of U.S. figure skating.

More than 10 years ago, I met Kwan during a Champions on Ice performance in Seattle after my parents somehow got me backstage access. I'm not sure I could even form a question during our private meeting, so this was an unexpected opportunity to fully recover from my embarrassing tween moment.