Eight Yukoners got some unexpected news on the weekend.
They’re millionaires.
The eight lucky gamblers all work at the Faro mine reclamation project. On the weekend, they got the news that they’d won the recent $25-million Lotto Max prize.
“It was total shock,” said Shelley Shaw, one of the eight winners.
“We thought this couldn’t be real. We didn’t believe it until last night when we went to the store and actually scanned the ticket and got the print-out of the $25 million,” Shaw said.
That prize works out to $3,125,000 per person.
“That’s $6,250,000 for our family. It’s incredible,” said Shaw’s sister, Krista Picket, who was also on the winning ticket.
So what does one buy with $6.25 million?
The family home on Newfoundland’s Fogo Island sounds pretty appealing to the sisters.
The pair moved to the Yukon in December, 1994, and when they left Fogo they had to sell the family home their father had built with his bare hands.
“Dad’s been buying 649 tickets all his life, and always used to say he wanted to win it so he’d have something to give to us. We said it’s time to give something back to you,” Shaw said.
“We’d love to be able to buy back the house he built, and have it as a family getaway,” she said.
The pair ended up in Faro because of their uncle. He had worked at the mine when it was operating, and convinced the sisters’ father to move the family up North.
“At home, we had the fishery but it was starting to die, so we decided to move out West,” Shaw said. Like many Easterners, the family headed B.C. and eventually made it to the Yukon following their uncle.
Now that Faro is home, they have no plans to leave, even with all the money, Shaw said.
And since they’re sticking around, there are also more Yukon items on the sisters’ shopping lists.
“We have an old 1990 GMC pick-up truck that we love, but it isn’t very reliable,” Shaw said. “We want to get a nice, new truck.”
Then the plan is to sock enough of the money away into investments to keep it safe, but not before having a little fun as well.
“We want to go do some really fun things, like go to Disneyland, the kind of things we’ve never really been able to,” Picket said.
Contact Jesse Winter at jessew@yukon-news.com