This category is Three Valley Lake Chateau & Ghost Town and yet they are different things and should have separate entries; the first is a hotel and the second an attraction anyone can visit without staying at the hotel, and hotel guests do not get free entry to the attraction. So I’ll do this review in two parts.

Three Valley Lake Chateau

When Mrs Pontac told me she had booked us in Three Valley Lake Chateau I thought it’d be an very posh exclusive resort hotel with a grand gourmet restaurant and when you first glimpse from Highway 1 over the lake it looks superb with its red roofs covered in gables. At places it looks like the gables have gables.

Reception is a huge wooden hall with a beautiful polished wooden staircase curving up to a library.
The hotel is built as an open square facing the lake, there are gardens with rivers, the lake has a sand beach and there are canoes to rent.

The rooms are largish basic motel rooms with all the facilities you’d expect and rooms have balconies or patios and all face the lake. I think the hotel was built in stages over time and its possible hotel rooms may vary depending when they were built. Inside it’s a warren of corridors and staircases. There’s an indoor garden with a walkway above it. There’s a room over the indoor swimming pool with two large pool (the game with cues and balls) tables, and another below the library and I don’t know what else is there if you take the time to explore. The place is huge.

There are two restaurants, a self serve cafeteria and a waitress service restaurant. But grand it ain’t and my concerns about leaving my tuxedo at home were unjustified.

Its basic diner type fare on bare wooden tables, portions are large but I think the quality of the raw materials could be improved. My chicken schnitzel seems like reconstituted meat and the steak was OK but no more. Wine came from a box but there is a wine list which – when found – consisted of one red, one white and one pink, all VQA (hurrah) all from St Hubertus and all specially labelled for the restaurant.

The location is great, we enjoyed sitting on our balcony with a glass of wine in hand looking at the lake.

There is no internet access in the room, you can get a wireless signal in the restaurant and by the front desk. (our room had line of sight to the restaurant and sometimes we got a weak signal by the window)

The hotel is built, owned, operated and maintained by the family of the man who originally bought the land it stands on. A neat fact about the hotel is that they generate their own electricity by means of a hydroelectric unit on a dam downriver.

Although Tripadvisor groups this in the Revelstoke category be aware that the hotel is fifteen minutes drive away along Highway 1 and that there are no alternative no dining places within walking distance. The hotel is closed over winter.

The Ghost Town

The Ghost Town is next to the hotel. Any one can visit and it is well worth while. It consists of around 30 historic buildings saved from destruction and re-erected here, some with original fittings as left when the building ceased its purpose. They range from a rough trappers hut to a ‘wild west’ saloon with bat-wing doors, two schools, a jail and a church still used for weddings and a row of shops.

There is a theatre and a museum of historic items from Indian arrowheads and artefacts through bottles, telegraph insulators, phonographs etc etc

There’s a fascinating display of early motor vehicles that shows how they evolved from a literally horseless carriage to a recognisable car.

There is an enormous circular railway engine shed, ‘the roundhouse’ the family have built to house a collection of steam engines and rolling stock and there’s a loop of railway track they hope to run public rides on when the legal formalities have been cleared.

Ghost Town is privately owned by the family that owns the hotel, there’s no government subsidy. They hate to see historic buildings destroyed so save them here.

We spent hours in Ghost Town and I don’t think we saw everything, indeed I know we missed out on the railway carriages you see at the front. If you’re interested in history of the area, plan your journey so you can spend a while here.

I’d award 5 stars for Ghost Town and 3 stars for the hotel so since they are both in one listing I am giving 4