Camping du Pylône 

So I went off to search for news and very quickly found that Camping du Pylône, where I spent so much time as a child and teenager, has been devastated.  There’s photo after photo of displaced and destroyed caravans on Facebook, along with the awful news that there was a fatality at the site.

All of which is just so hard to get my head around.

In my mind the place is just wonderful, so much more than ‘just a campsite’.  And from what I’ve been reading online I’m not the only one who feels that way about it.  I’ve seen several people refer to it as a home from home.  The place holds so many memories for so many people.

Blah Blah.
Anyone who visited Pylone in the last 25 years will most likely have heard this amazing local band play, they were hugely popular there!  I know we loved seeing them every summer when they would visit the site to perform, and I remember one particular night when I was probably about 11, playing table football with them – such a claim to fame!

Working the system at the restaurant.
I’m not sure we ever actually ate at the restaurant on site, preferring to eat my Dad’s lovely bbq’d food at the caravan.  But what we’d quite often do is go and get some takeaway chips to accompany our dinner.  What we worked out quite early on was that if you took the biggest saucepan you could find, they would fill it up for you, rather than just giving you a small polystyrene container’s worth of chips.  Oh we felt so smug every time we saw someone collecting one of those while we walked off with our huge haul of chips in our saucepan!

Birthdays.
With my birthday being in August, we were often in Antibes for it.  My parents would decorate the caravan for me and we’d normally head out to Flunch for lunch where they’d give you a yummy cake on your birthday, which as a teenager would always embarrass me a bit which my parents loved!  On a side note, we always seemed to spot shooting stars when we were there over my birthday week, which I remember thinking was really cool.  It was only years later that I realised that it was because the Perseid meteor shower takes place at that time every year!

Making friends.
Every year, almost as soon as we’d arrived, we would start nosing around our row of caravans, trying to suss out if there were any kids our age around.  Which lead to the family joke of shouting ‘fogey alert’ when a car with just grown ups in it pulled drove past.  Still makes me smile today!

We made some great summer friends at Pylone, quite a few of whom we actually did write to for ages after we’d all gone home, sharing jokes from the summer and stories of our lives at home.

The campsite itself.
I have such fond memories of Camping du Pylône.  I can close my eyes and picture in great detail so many aspects of it – the swimming pool (including the cafe where we would buy Miko ice creams), the bar where we would spend our evenings playing pool and table football, the table ping-pong (as it became known to us courtesy of the French friends that we made) where we spent a lot of time not actually playing ping-pong; it’s all so clear in my head still!

A few years ago my husband and I went back to the area for a holiday with my parents to Camping L’Eden in Biot, and we actually went for a little tour around Pylône and it was amazing how these feelings and memories of past summers came rushing back.  Honestly, the more I look at the photos of the aftermath of the floods, the more my heart aches.  That place holds so many wonderful memories for me, I feel almost like I grew up there, a little more every summer, hell, I had my first kiss there!

My heart goes out to all the families that have been affected by the floods, I really hope that life gets back to normal as soon as possible.  And as far as Pylone goes, I’ve been following the news about it on Facebook and there’s an amazing sense of community spirit and so much love for the place, I’m sure it’ll only be a matter of time before it’s back to it’s former glory.