Thursday, June 23, 2011

Little Hay round up.

So I guess it is about time if not way to late for us to give you a round up on how the Hay festival went for us.

It was a pretty amazing week for everyone involved, we managed to run both bikes from 10am-10pm for pretty much the entire festival. We transported 1000’s of customers up and down the 1/2 mile straight to Hay and back. Which as you can see took its toll on young Ben

We arrived on the morning of our first shift and were quickly ushered to our temporary digs in Fred’s store tent.

Which provided us with some grand facilities, I’m pictured here with our chill out area and luxury relaxing seating provisions…

Joking aside it was brilliant to get the chance to get out of the weather and refuel when we needed it and we are very grateful for the team at Hay for putting up with our antics and providing us with a safe place to leave our belongings.

By the end of a long shift the site of the tent bought an all over feeling of relief to the body and it was also a great time for all of us to see each other.

Ben and Joe were never short of supplies from the catering tent.

Also having a quiet area gave us plenty of time to prep bikes and share stories.


Most of the stories were about the incredible wind up and down the main straight to Hay, each day it blew a different direction and every day it was punishing. But the tales of extraordinary feats came in day after day, of Duggan’s huge non stop mileage counts, of whopping tips from Mike, or failing knees from Ben, or Australian banter from Woody, of mid shift ‘bonk’ from Joe and who’s had which celebrity and what they tipped from just about everyone.



Hay festival was very busy and a great place for people to get to meet the authors and speakers they have followed for many years. Here John Snow vanishes into the busy crowd.

Between us over the week we got to know lots of the top names. We bumped into Jason Bradbury and rushed a suitcase of books from his hotel to a signing, entertained Matt Horne, hauled Brian Moore up the hill into town, had banter and love notes from Arthur Smith, narrowly missed the Arch Bishop of Canterbury and talked about Andy Murray with Germaine Greer. So for us it was an interesting time and a pleasure to be at the festival. We even got to slip into a Cerys Matthews gig.


The unsung heroes Matt and Tom need to be credited, they worked hard in Hereford keeping everything in order and running the business, without them we wouldn’t have been able to work at Hay.

So in summary it was great and we hope to do it again, we estimate we moved the same amount of people by the end of the week that 100 of the regular shuttle buses would have and that everyone of our customers had a great time.

See you there next year!

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