James S. was driving home to Lethbridge, from Manitoba, with his partner and a friend. Suddenly his cellphone lit up with a call from CKUA.
“It was kind of crazy,” he says, “I saw the caller ID and thought, ‘what in the world could they possibly have to call me about?’”
He tried to pick up but had trouble with his Bluetooth connection and couldn’t at first.
“We had to wait a little while for a call back and I thought, ‘there’s only one reason they would be calling.’ And the whole time we were waiting we were saying, ‘well, maybe it’s something else, there’s got to be another reason, I can’t be this lucky, right?’”
But he was that lucky.
James had won $203,530 in the CKUA 50/50 raffle.
It made for a fun drive. “We had just started that drive home so we still had eight hours left in the car,” he says, “and it gave us something to talk about the whole way.”
The ideas got very big but they’ve toned down a bit since.
“Trying to be a little more realistic, a little less fantastic,” he smiles.
Thoughts include a down payment for a house and investing. “It’s gotten a lot more boring, the longer I’ve had to sit with it,” he laughs.
He did, however, pay off the student loans from his history degree. “That felt very good,” he says.
He also bought a vintage guitar he’d been eyeing for a while.
“It’s this really old, parlour-style acoustic guitar from the 1890s, it’s very small, just a really nice little thing,” he says.
His band, The Decadent Phase, has been together almost 10 years. “We’re probably going to have our last big show sometimes this summer because I’m moving away.”
He’s moving to Victoria in September to attend law school.
It’s nice timing to win the 50/50, he says.
“It seems like now I might not have to have a job at the same time so I’ll be able to focus more on studies, hopefully,” he says.
A week before he received the news, he and his partner had booked flights to London. They hadn’t booked accommodation yet.
“So we just were able to really splurge on the hotel stays,” he says. “Those plans got a little crazy, we talked about renting out castles, but really nice hotels is where we ended up going.”
Sounds great, James! Good luck with all of it!
And now we have a new 50/50 running! Buy your tickets here now. Ticket sales close at midnight, Thursday, March 12. Our 50/50 raffles are consistently the biggest in the province. Play today!
“Gimme Rain” by James’ band, The Decadent Phase:
