Rugby World Cup Guide Published

Posted by Mike Gerrard Feb 14, 2007

I spent much of 2006 working on the Official Travel Guide to the Rugby World Cup 2007. As I was born in the rugby-mad town of St Helens in Lancashire, I've been a rugby fan ever since I could hold a rattle. So as a travel writer it was a dream assignment – to be one of the principal authors on the official guide. Even if it was the rugby union world cup, rather than the superior game of rugby league, it was still a terrific project to be involved in.

I wrote most of the book, with my wife Donna Dailey, who also did most of the photography for the guide. We were helped by Hope Caton, who covered the venue cities we couldn't get to. As I'm writing this, the book is being printed, and Donna and I can't wait to see the finished copies, as you can imagine.

We have a good idea what the World Cup Guide 2007 will look like, thanks to the wonders of technology. Although we're in Arizona right now, and the publishers are in London and the printers in Slovenia, we've been able to see most of the chapters as PDF files, and make some last-minute corrections. We downloaded them thanks to the free wifi network at the wonderful Green Valley library, as we don't yet have internet access at our new home here.

On a computer screen the various chapters look fabulous, and we've been reliving our visits to the world cup venue cities we covered: Edinburgh, Cardiff, Marseille, Montpellier, Toulouse, Bordeaux, St-Etienne and Lyon. What a trip! But it was of course followed by several months of hard work doing the writing, sorting and captioning the photos, writing extra text to fill gaps when the pages were laid out.

Hopefully a few early copies of the book will be winging their way towards Arizona soon, a place where I think it's safe to assume that the word 'rugby' does not get said very often.

For more information about the Rugby World Cup Guide, click here.