La Rochelle - a new travel option for getting to our Brittany Cottage

Next week a family of four from Keighley in West Yorkshire is renting our Brittany Cottage.

This in itself is not unusual as the Cottage is rented out quite a lot and is booked pretty much solid from May through the summer season.

But it was the route they were travelling by that was a first-of-a-kind as they were flying in to La Rochelle airport as Leeds Bradford is 'just on their doorstep' and the flight times with Jet2 were quite convenient.

On the Travel routes to reach our Brittany Holiday Cottage page of our website we've listed all the different French ferry routes (P&O, LD Lines, BrittanyFerries, Eurostar, NorfolkLine, Condor, etc) from the UK and Ireland to France, and similarly there's details of all the budget and not-so-budget airlines that fly into what I thought were all the nearby French airports (Rennes, Dinard, Lorient, Nantes, Brest, etc) ... but not La Rochelle!

For all our guests we always email them a few weeks before the start of their holiday with detailed directions on how to get to the Cottage from their destination Ferryport or Airport ... but again I didn't have any directions from La Rochelle as no-one had been to the Cottage via that airport before!

So I was off on a new challenge, putting together the driving directions from La Rochelle airport to our holiday cottage. Fortunately I've done this for enough different airports and ferry ports now that I have it pretty much off pat with a combination of Google Maps (who have the best maps) and ViaMichelin (who have better turn by turn driving instructions).

As many of the different travel routes are very similar I build up the route using a series of sub-routes so in the case of La Rochelle it was simply a case of working out the directions from La Rochelle up to Nantes and then grafting these onto the existing directions I had from Nantes to the Cottage. And job done, uploaded the directions to the website and emailed the details onto our forthcoming guests.

But of course I couldn't just leave it at that, could I?

No, I then set about adding La Rochelle to the website travel options page which meant searching through each of the airlines to see if they fly into La Rochelle (turns out that RyanAir, FlyBe, AerArran, Jet2 and EasyJet all have routes into La Rochelle), adding their details to the website, finding out that other routes into France had now changed or been discontinued, which in turn ended up as more website changes ... oh but Jet2 wasn't previously on the travel options page so I had to download and resize an appropriate Icon before I could add it .... and before I knew it what had started off as a quick and simple new set of driving directions had turned into several hours sitting in front of the computer in my study!

Better not succumb to any more "simple website" updates or else Liz will be serving me with divorce papers for abandonment ...