Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Hotel de Glace
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
The Hotel de Glace, about an hour outside Quebec City, is North American hemisphere’s only ice hotel. The competitors are in places like Finland, Norway and the Swiss alps.
My pre-teen daughter Brittany and her older brother Ben are with me on a winter holiday. I have not yet told them about the below-zero weather forecast.
The Hotel de Glace—sculpted, carved and erected from 40,000 tons of ice and snow—is an igloo on steroids. Larger and more labyrinthian than the promotional website photos suggest.
The minute we arrive, my kids insist on investigating the place without their hovering father who, they vehemently insist, cramps their style. In the context of exploring an ice hotel, I have no clue what that means.
As they saunter out of sight, I am left in a vaulted room to admire icy columns, a hanging ice chandelier and various ten-foot-tall creatures carved on the walls from snow. The chairs and tables are blocks of ice.
My parental alarm sensors start pulsing. Wherever my kids are, they have been there longer than reasonable.
My search-and-rescue operation begins by poking in and out of the fifty sleeping rooms arranged along four icy, white corridors. Each room, every wall, is carved with ice designs in intricate motifs, often backlit with eerie, ghostly colors.
The hardened imagery taunts me. Lost children, abducted children, frozen children. My teasing about human popsicles doesn’t seem so amusing right now.
The pace of my booted footsteps on the crunching ice accelerates. Inside the ice hotel, nothing echoes.
I check out the ice chapel, then over to the outdoor patio where the majestic mountainscapes now appear ominous and unwelcoming. The grand hall is crowded. No sign of them. The ice slide is being used by much younger children.
The voice in my head pre-records a phone message to my wife. “Dear, the kids are still at the Hotel de Glace. They’re having a wonderful time. Don’t worry. In the spring when the ice melts, I promise we’ll find them.”
The nearby Valcartier Vacation Village resort and recreation park encompasses a spa, multiple restaurants, gift and ski shop, digital game room, snow rafting, skating and a 4-star hotel. My kids could be anywhere.
I head into the ice bar. The house specialty is a champagne, gin, limoncello cocktail in a cube-shaped glass made of clear, frozen ice. After a few of these, perhaps I will be less upset, less judgmental, about losing a child or two.
At what point will one of them, probably Brittany, get panicky? I hold back from asking passersby if they’ve seen a young girl in a pink hooded parka. At least three dozen pink parkas have strolled by me in the last hour.
Marshalling eons of encoded father wisdom, I post up near a small wooden shack selling a local treat: maple taffy. Boiled maple sap is poured on a bed of ice, then rolled up on a stick to make a cavity-extracting lollipop.
When my extremities are on the edge of frostbite, from seemingly nowhere they appear laughing and grinning as if the world loves them. They are sharing a wad of maple candy like nothing, nothing at all, is amiss.
Nothing is.
