The camping has a swimming pool, access free, to all campers during the opening hours.
Treat yourself as you deserve with the icecreams of the snack and make your every day orders of fresh bread and french butter "croissant" for breakfast. You can also order other delicious takeout meals if you do not want to cook.
While watching over your younger children playing at the nearby small children game area, you will be able to choose between:
- swimming and sunbathing at the swimming pool
- playing a ping-pong game
- playing a "petanque game" which is a local bowl game famous in Provence. (see explanation and photos below)
Petanque
The bowl game, as it seems, is as old as other civilised pleasures since it has been played in the ancient Egypt, then adopted by the greeks, then by the romans and introduced to the gauls in France by the romans.
Then after the bowl players in the middle ages, the golden age of the bowl is certainly the Renaissance when the nobility begins to play at it as well as the "cup and ball" and "real tennis" games.
Beware: it seems that the game is so addictive that it has been forbidden twice in France at different times:
- On May 23, 1369, when King Charles V puts a heavy fine on it so that his subjects change to other sports that are more useful to train for war...!
- From 1629 to the french revolution for cryptic reasons
In the XIX century, nearly every region in France plays it with local variances on the rules. In Provence, people play at the "provençal game" which is a more acrobatic version with a bigger playground and where one has to shoot running three big steps. This is the elegant game that the french southerner writer Marcel Pagnol describes in his books ("Le temps des amours"- A time for love) and can be seen in the film "My Fathers Glory and My Mothers Castle"
The "provençal game" will give birth to what is known now as the "petanque" when in 1907, one hundred years ago, the provence champion, Jules Hugues, could not go on playing his favourite game because of his rheumatism and began to draw a circle, throwed the jack to 5-6 m distance and played without moving his feet inside the circle.
The petanque ("Pe" -foot- "tanca" -stake- which means "grounded feet") to oppose the provençal game where the feet have to move and run, was born...
Thanks to Jules Hugues illness and inventiveness, with the same spirit of the paralympic games, we do not have to be athletic to play the bowls and everybody from children to women and senior people can enjoy the game.
