This weekend we headed to Hotel de Glace (the Ice Hotel) in Quebec. We booked this ages ago and we had both forgotten about it until a couple of weeks ago when we started to get crazy excited. It is an entire hotel made of ice. The structure, the furnishings, the decorations, everything is made completely of ice. It seemed too incredible to be true!
As I mentioned in previous blogs, the weather here in Ontario has been unseasonably warm (having said that we are expecting another dump of snow this weekend!) so we were relatively concerned that the hotel might melt before we got there. Joep called the hotel the week before we went and asked if it had melted yet and was assured that it would still be standing when we got there. Phew!
So on Friday afternoon Joep collected me from work and we hit the road for the hotel. We arrived at Sainte-Catherine-de-la-Jacques-Cartier shortly after 8pm in time for a late bite to eat before settling into our warm hotel for the night. We had a huge living room with a roaring open fire all to ourselves so we curled up with a bottle of red wine in front of the open fire completely content!
Saturday we were up in time to enjoy a delicious breakfast with endless views before heading down to check out the Ice Hotel, our home for that night! On the way down we bumped into a guy who had stayed there the night before and he informed us that the chapel was no longer standing. They build an entire chapel of ice every year and people even get married in there so we were a bit bummed to have missed it.
Thankfully the rest of the hotel was still standing and it was as impressive as we imagined. Upon entering the hotel you walk into the grand foyer complete with a hanging ice chandelier. We were flabbergasted and spent the next little while wandering around the entire hotel. The hotel has 38 bedrooms/suites each with an entirely different theme from Grecian to under the sea to floral. There was no shortage of breathtaking sights! On top of this the hotel includes a café, a fully serviced bar and an ice slide that goes from the second floor to the ground floor. Not to mention the Nordic spas and saunas that are open from 8pm-8am for the overnight guests to enjoy all night long!!
We were suitably impressed and extraordinarily excited about the sleepover we were about to have!! But we couldn’t check in until all the day guests had left the hotel (the first time in my life I have slept in a hotel that people drive for miles just to SEE!) so we headed to Quebec City for a few hours of eating and wandering around.
Upon arrival in Quebec City the city was buzzing. It turns out that the Redbull Crashed Ice race was on. It is an ice skating race on a treacherous course set up through the city centre. 20 different countries were represented this year and skaters go through the track in groups of 4. It is hardcore. It also attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors to the city for this one weekend in the year so the city was in party mode! This suited us perfectly because so were we! After a stroll through the city with a brief refreshments break we headed back to the hotel for our 5pm introduction to the hotel and detailed instructions on how not to freeze to death overnight. When sleeping in a room made entirely of ice it is imperative to remember that moisture is your enemy. Any moisture will freeze and make you very uncomfortable. We have already experienced this phenomenon during the Ottawa winter whenever we left the house so we felt ready to take on the challenge!
After our induction Joep and I went for a relaxing walk before heading up to the restaurant for a long relaxing dinner. Unbeknownst to me Joepinator had been very busy the last couple of weeks planning a lovely surprise for me! The setting was perfect right down to our flamboyant French waitress who was more excited about my surprise that I was! After we had enjoyed the first 2 courses of our meal and I had stopped asking Joep why he was so stressed out and acting so weird, a bag arrived in front of me. It contained all of my blogs from 3 years in Amsterdam professionally printed and bound. Point of note: the weekend before this trip Joep got a cryptic phone call and was discussing binding with someone … when I asked him about the call, he said it was a surprise. I thought he had bought me a snowboard and was less than impressed by this. I was, however, ridiculously impressed with the bound book! I have been meaning to do this for ages but it takes so much time. Joepinator outdid himself!
We spent a chunk of the main course flicking through the book and reminiscing about all the incredible times we have had over the last years. As we were finishing looking through the book, Joepinator broke out the big surprise for me and dropped to one knee to pop the big question. The words were barely out of his mouth before I exclaimed ‘Of course!’ in answer to his request that I be his wife. As we all know, I am a giant crybaby. I cry when afraid, I cry when sad, I cry when things don’t go my way (true story … I’m working on it). However I have never been a happy crier. Until Saturday 20 March 2010. I always thought it was stupid to cry when you’re happy but I spent the next 5-10 minutes balling my eyes out and laughing hysterically at the same time. The happiest tears ever shed!
After recovering from the shock of the proposal, Joep informed me of all the preparation it had taken to get to this point. I was impressed that he managed to keep it all a secret! I was even more impressed when I heard that he had done the gentlemanly thing and asked daddyo Dave for permission. Hilariously, when Joep called the Delany house on Friday to tell them that he was going to propose, dad told him that normally he would be doing the right thing by asking the father for permission however in the Delany household he is not the boss. The mother ship at this point was hovering around the telephone refraining herself from snatching it out of dad’s hands … but only just barely! Naturally she gave him her FULL approval followed by a big rant about loving him and loving us etc. After the proposal we spoke with dad and the mother ship and I berated mum for making Joep ask them both for permission to marry me. Mother ship responding saying ‘Sure do you think I’d let your father make that decision? He’d let Jack the Ripper take you if he was willing to!’ Hilarious! And who could blame him … all these years with 5 women, he must be exhausted!
We celebrated our engagement by polishing off a bottle of champagne before heading down to the hotel for cocktail hour!! The hotel by night is even more incredible. Only 8 people were staying overnight so we had a free run of the hotel. We drank cocktails out of glasses made from ice, we made ice sculptures (Joep was REALLY good at this and made an awesome bear … I made ummm a lump of ice) and we spent some quality time on the ice slide before hitting up the Nordic spas for some R&R. Feeling suitably relaxed we headed to bed for the nights biggest challenge – Getting into our sleeping bags.
It took Joep a good 10 minutes to get into his while I took photos and belly laughed at his expense. It took me even longer to get in. And within an hour of getting in I realized that I needed to go to the toilet. I spent the next hour sporadically telling Joep that I needed to go to the toilet and wiggling around trying NOT to need to go to the toilet. It was a lost battle and at about 4am I caved and braved the cold to go to the bathroom. No, the bathrooms are not made of ice. Thankfully they are in a heated room so it wasn’t too painful however a giant Ice Hotel is pretty eerie at nighttime and I have an active imagination so by the time I sprinted back to our room I was convinced that I was the next victim of a crazed ice serial killer. Dramatic much? Even more annoying - within 30 minutes of getting back into the sleeping bag I needed to go AGAIN! Disaster.
Needless to say, I did not get the best night of sleep. Everyone else we spoke to, including Joep, managed to get a glorious night of sleep and some people even complained that they were too warm in their rooms. Go figure!
Another thing that kept me up was the fear of the hotel melting on top of us. I put a water bottle on the bedside table which was, of course, made of ice. In the middle of the night I heard something crackling. I turned on the light to see that the water bottle had melted through the table! Whoops!!
And so, early on Sunday morning when Joep woke up we headed back up for warm showers before enjoying a delicious brunch whilst sharing stories with the other guests. We then headed down for our VIP tour of the Ice Hotel which was incredibly interesting. We learned all about how the hotel is made and a lot about the history of the Inuit people who developed the whole igloo building technique.
I won’t bore you all with all the details but I will share a couple of interesting facts. The Inuit people are often referred to as Eskimo’s which is not a name they are fond of. Why? Well, when the British first came to Canada the took a Native American with them. When they came across the Inuit people living in igloos and eating raw fish they asked the American who these barbarians were?? The American, as a joke, called them ‘Eskimo’s’ which means ‘Eater of raw fish’. So there you go! Also, Inuit mean man. A much nicer name.
Final point of interest … as you all know we went to the Olympics this year so we saw Inukshuk’s all over the place. The Inukshuk is an Inuit stone statue that symbolizes security and welcome. Inukshuks can be found scattered throughout Northern Canada and Alaska. If you see one you can rest assured that if you walk in the direction of either arm you are walking on solid ground and will not fall down a crevice. In addition you will find another Inukshuk within 100kms. Finally, at the base of each Inukshuk, if you dig 1 meter down you will find a box full of frozen fish for you to eat and bits of meat for the dogs as well as a kit to fix your dog sled if you get into any problems with it. How cool is that? We thought so!!
After our tour we hit the road for home. On the drive back to Ottawa we stopped off at Mont Tremblant for a run on the slopes. I skipped it preferring to chill out with my book in the sun but Joep did a few runs. The town in Tremblant is just beautiful so we’ll be heading back there some time in the not too distant future!
And then, after all the excitement of the weekend we were home in Ottawa spreading the word about our exciting future plans!! We’re so unbelievably excited to be spending the rest of our lives together. It all seems a bit too good to be true at the moment!
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