Doug Kinsman didn't get much sleep this weekend. Neither did his wife Liz. But the Toronto couple, who have been married for 39 years, weren't fighting and they weren't sick. Instead, they couldn't wait for Monday to come so they could cash their top winning Super 7 lottery ticket, the only one sold in Ontario.
The prize: a whopping $27 million.
The couple came to the Ontario Lottery headquarters not long after it opened for the week to collect the mighty cheque and begin the next phase of their lives. Doug bought the Quick Pick on Friday, the day of the drawing, and credits losing the numbers he used to use about a year ago with making it possible.
Not that he actually believed he'd really won. In fact, the pair didn't actually check the numbers until long after the draw was done. "[We] started to read the numbers out and we got to the fourth one and Liz said 'let me see if I can guess the next one.' And she did. And the next one and the next one."
"I didn't think he was telling the truth," she laughs as her husband holds up the cheque with so many zeroes on it.
Even then, Kinsman refused to trust his luck, taking it to one of those blue scanners in a store. "It said 'your ticket is worth $27 million.' And so I went back home and paced back and forth and then I went to another store and put it in the blue thing and it said 'you won $27 million,'" he remembers.
What did they do once they were finally convinced? "Then we called the [two] children," Liz laughs. The winners plan to take everyone on a Christmas cruise, a trip they normally take only with each other. Other ideas in the hopper? Finishing their cottage in Orillia, donating some to charity and buying a car - although Kinsman won't say which kind, in hopes of getting a better deal.
But don't expect the money to change them. She works for an insurance agent. He sells cottages in Muskoka. And he has no plans to quit. "I'd do it for nothing," he reveals. "When you're up in Lake Muskoka with clients, why would anybody want to quit that job?"
He now has 27 million possible reasons if he decides to change his mind.
And one thing more. The Kinsmans aren't just Super 7 lucky, they're just plain lucky. The same ticket that won them the $27 million also paid off on another line. The haul there: a whole ten bucks.