It seems we have finally woken up and smelt the freshly brewed coffee served in a hotel coming to your region, soon. What may well be the opportunity of a lifetime is finally coming our way. Yes, I’m talking about our own hotel in Val-d’Or.
Wow, is there no end to our amazing ability to keep up with the times? Am I soon to be able to host meetings, galas and conferences in the glorious south (or halfway north, whichever way you look at things) in the great valley of gold? Yes, apparently so. In what seems to be the most no-brainer business choice in decades, we are finally deciding to build a hotel in the place where we spend most of our hard-earned money.
Can you imagine the possibilities? First of all, we can truthfully ask ourselves, tax, what’s that, come check out time. We can say, yes, we did charge some things to the room, and rightfully so, without having the HST to even talk about or haggle over. I also believe that some things will change in terms of the way a hotel is run and here are a few examples.
Check-out time is the same as Indian time, except later. Check-in time is after driving all night from James Bay and getting a room without a reservation, because we just came from one (get it). Room service will have all the gratuities built into the charge, so we don’t have to be offended or forgetful to tip for the service. Also, the issue of credit cards, will a simple purchase order or promise to pay later suffice? Of course, free Internet service and parking will have to be included, since no one can go anywhere without access to their Facebook account.
Before I go ballistic with my demands, I’ll tell you a quaint story of the history of hotels and Crees in Val-d’Or. Many, many moons ago, a famous hotel was just down the street from our main headquarters at 1500 Sullivan, a hotel permanently deleted from our memories, until you met someone who could recall the night before and recant lurid tales of the past 24 hours. Yes, vaguely, many would uncertainly say, perhaps those things did go on, but pardon my foggy mind, let’s just get back to work okay?
After many years of service to us as clientele, this famous landmark became a retirement home. A few years later, another hotel did the same thing and established another wheezing geezers’ hangout. Then, a few years after that, another hotel simply came down and became a lot for a supermarket. Overall, several hundred rooms were lost in Val-d’Or and people just couldn’t come down as often and business migrated further south to Montreal and even Gatineau.
Soon a new hotel will go up to answer the swelling need for us to have a nice big room and comfy bed to pass out on. I hope that there are a number of suites in the new hotel, because the head count for the number of big shots is rising steadily, since many of the old guard don’t wear as many hats as they used to and have graciously handed out new hats for us younger ones to wear. Maybe one day, there will be another hotel in Montreal, just for us.
