Rugby World Cup Guide Now Out

March sees the publication of the Official Travel Guide to the 2007 Rugby World Cup, on which our blogger Mike Gerrard has been working for the last twelve months

It's here at last. The culmination of a year's work arrives with the postman knocking on the door, and holding a parcel. I sign for it and rip it open. My wife Donna is hanging out the washing in the back yard (the glamorous life of the travel writer), so I rush out and show her a copy. It's the book that's occupied our lives for much of the last twelve months: the Official Travel Guide to the Rugby World Cup 2007. And we have to say, trying to set all bias aside – it looks terrific.

So how do these things happen, that's what people always want to know. How do you get a job like that? It really began as far back as December 2005, when my wife and I went to a Christmas lunch at the wonderful Mosimann's in London. It's an annual lunch given by a travel PR company with the clever name of Travel PR. There we met Hope Caton, who runs the guidebook publisher Purple Guides with her husband Robin and designer Sharon Platt.

At that time Purple Guides had only produced guides to Italy, all of them written by Hope herself. We both liked Hope's company and we kept in touch. Fast-forward a year and thanks to their stylish Italy guides, Purple Guides win the contract from the International Rugby Board to produce the Official Travel Guide to the Rugby World Cup 2007, being held in France with some matches in Cardiff and Edinburgh. By now Hope knows of our love of France, and my interest in rugby, having grown up in the rugby-mad town of St Helens.

Writing and photographing the guide is too big a job for Hope to take on herself, as she'll also be working behind the scenes on planning, editing, designing and publishing the book. Donna and I are hired to cover eight of the twelve cities involved in the tournament, and Hope will do the other four.

There then follows a frantic time for all of us. I organise visits to Edinburgh and Cardiff, and in-between them a 5-week visit to France taking in Lyon, St-Etienne, Marseille, Montpellier, Toulouse and Bordeaux, and excursions from each of those cities to places we've always wanted to see, like Arles, Aix, Cognac and Carcassonne. We travel by train, thanks to France Rail, and work with the local tourist boards to try to pack as much into our 5-6 days in each city as possible.

It's a fabulous trip, yes, but busy and totally exhausting. We're on the go from morning to night every single day, except for the last couple of days when we manage to grab some time for ourselves. Even then, we're writing about the fabulous Chateau Mirambeau for the rugby guide, and I'm writing an article about it for a magazine.

When we get back home, of course, the work's only just beginning. The next few months see us writing something like 60,000 words, Donna organising and captioning several thousand photos, from which the editors make their choices. They are busy laying out the pages, and sending them to us to look at and comment on, and between us we put the book together in time for the launch, last Sunday, before the England-France match at Twickenham.

And if you want to see the result of our labours, or just read more about the Official Travel Guide to the Rugby World Cup 2007, click here.