Hotel de Glace

by Brie—grade 5

When we drove up to the hotel, Nate, Amelia and I all said, “Where’s the hotel?” I mean, there was a building in front of us but it was certainly not made out of ice. When we got inside of the stone building I saw that to my left there was a gift shop and to my right there were bathrooms and a water fountain. My mom was rushing us to go to the counter to get our tickets and get to the last tour as I was looking around. When we walked to the out the back door of the stone building we walked down a wooden ramp. We saw an ice climbing place where you could climb ice on the weekend and then we saw a map of the ice hotel and then we walked to the outside of the ice hotel. We walked to the first entryway of the ice hotel that led us to the bar area. When I walked into the bar the first thing I saw was an ice sculpture of an animal skin and when I walked around the ice sculpture I saw colored lights on the ground and ice pillars. When we saw a tour we found out that it was a French tour. We walked outside and asked a lady where the English tour was. When we found the tour we only got to see the chapel where people can get married and there are real animal furs on the ice benches. After that we went to the bar and that’s where our tour ended.

We walked around the rooms and suites for a while. My favorite suite was an avalanche room. It had blocks of snow piled up into an entryway and there was an ice bed and an ice table and benches. Then we went to the ice slide and we went down on our knees and belly. We met a girl and her mom and dad at the ice slide. After that we walked to a building that was not made out of ice and ate dinner. Then we went to a meeting about how to take care of yourself in that kind of weather. The lady who was there told us how to wrap up in our sleeping bags. After that we went to look at suite one which was the only deluxe suite. I thought that the avalanche room was cooler than suite one but suite one did have its own hot tub. When it was about nine o’clock we went to our room to see room already set up with the sleeping bags. Then we went to the bar area because there were games and at ten fifteen there was going to be ice sculpting.

When we arrived at the bar area we saw the girl from the slide. When the game began we got paired with the girl and her mom and dad. The object of the game was to get the object that the score keeper shouts out. Of course we lost but we still got a pin. After that we got to carve ice sculptures. We got small blocks of ice. I carved a mountain range. After that we went to the warm room where you could get dressed for bed or for the hot tub and the sauna. In the warm room we found out that my dad had brought in the wrong bag so my dad had to run back out to the car and get the other bag with the swim suits. We got dressed and we ran out to the hot tubs. After the hot tubs we sat in the sauna for a few minutes then went back to the warm room to get changed into our long johns. Then we ran to our room, put on our socks and got into our sleeping bags.