La Rochelle is a town on the West Coast of France. It is a large harbour town, and at one point in its history it was the largest harbour in France.

Driving into the town is relatively simple, the car parks are well signposted, and we decided to park right on the harbour front. The charges for the car park were very reasonable, at least compared to car parks where I live; it was just a couple of Euros for a full day.

Despite the area being a tourist area there were very few souvenir style shops, and apart from Game and a couple of other international businesses, most of the shops were (or looked to be) small stores owned by locals.
Having had our fill of shopping, and after almost getting mown down by a bendy bus, we decided it was time to head back toward the harbour and visit one of the many restaurants that line the harbour front. A lot of the restaurants/cafes specialise in seafood, which is no great surprise considering their location, but we were only after a midday snack, so stopped at a cafe selling baguettes and pastries. The prices in the restaurants all seemed pretty much of a muchness, and our lunch cost 8€ per adult and 6€ per child, and this included a baguette of your choice, a cake or pastry of your choice and a can of pop. The only problem we had was due to our lack of French, and we didn’t know how to say we would be sitting outside, and ended up with our baguettes and pastries in takeaway bags rather than on plates, but we still sat out at the front anyway and no one seemed to bother.

After having a pleasant stroll around the harbour we walked over to one of the harbour towers and decided to take a look around. It wasn’t too expensive at 6€ for an adult, with under 18s and students free (with a valid student card), so we only had to pay for 3 adults. You can also buy discounted tickets if you wish to visit all three towers; however we decided just to stick with Tour Saint Nicolas. Tour Saint Nicolas is the largest of the 3 towers, and is on the south side of the harbour. The inside of the tower isn’t overly impressive, it’s basically solid walls with the occasional stone frieze, there’s a large circular room about half way up, which has some little snippets of information, and a few rooms such as the captain’s watch room and guard room, but none of them have been decorated in any way, they are just bare stone walls.

So after doing a full circuit of that terrace we eventually found the entrance to the top level, and if the view from the terrace below was great, the one from the top was amazing, you could see right across the bay and right across the town. They had installed a telescope at the top, but it wasn’t very well positioned for adults. There was a step for children to stand on, and if an adult used this they ended up having to squat whilst using the telescope, standing on the floor though meant that you were too low down and only looked at the sky. The spiral staircase to the top floor was much steeper, and I’m glad there was no one to pass on the stairs because I would not have been able to move over to the narrow section.

We did notice some names scrawled into the walls as we were wandering round, and immediately thought it was your usual scumbags who couldn’t give a damn about anything, but we actually found out that in previous centuries it was used as a prison, and it was actually the prisoners who’d scratched their names into the walls. Further up the tower some of the names scrawled alongside dates from the World War II era.

After our visit to the tower we headed back around the harbour, and found a row of cafes painted in a Balamory style, we stopped for ice creams and they were some of the nicest ice creams I’ve tasted (of course I had to sample the kids as well as my own!). There weren’t cheap at 2, 50€ for a single scoop, but they were really creamy and full of flavour.