Petanque!

Well it is official we are addicts. Today we played at least 8 hours of Petanque. For everyone who does not know the game Petanque is a french game very similar to Bocce Ball. The goal of the game is to get as close as you can to the Chochone or "little piggy" in french. The team which is closer after all the balls are thrown gets the point or points depending on how many balls they have closer.
Today we got up, ate some food and drove over to the local Miami Petanque court. (yes we are in Miami doing a Renaissance Festival for three weeks. We will be back in Austin int the end of Jan.) The Petanque court is not your normal gravel path or your normal city park location. The Miami Petanque club meets at the Biltmore Hotel one of the fanciest Hotels in Florida. Here is the link http://www.biltmorehotel.com/ This is the kind of place where a cup of black coffee costs $4 and the past guests include the Clintons, Heather Gram and the Dali Lama.
Our Mentor Arsene Dupin (Please check him out he is amazing) is also our Petanque coach ( I know, who would think it?) His addiction to the game is worse than ours. He is the president of the Heart of Texas Petanque club (the one we play with back in Austin). Wow this really is a lot of background. Anyway we arrived at the Biltmore at 11:30 where we were supposed to play with the executive chef and the general manager (Arsene has a way of connecting with people, especially the French.) It turned out that they could not play because of some important meetings and such so we played just the three of us for a couple hours.
Later the chef asked us if we wanted to eat and had a fabulous lunch served for us. Then we went for a walk down the smancy streets of Coral Gables and back to the Biltmore for more Petanque. We were joined later (5:00) by the locals and had a rematch of team Texas vs. team Miami. We won again. We quit around 9pm wow. A year ago we had hardly heard of the game now we are marathon players, what a strange life.
We had fun pretending to be millionaires today. Wherever we follow Arsene we end up in the strangest most wonderful places. Today was fun tomorrow we go to visit a famous animal trainer and pet tigers. (I'm not kidding)