So much has happened since I last blogged.

IW Festival has come and gone. From the outside world it probably looks like little more than a weekend with a few extra buses running out of a farmers’ field…if only!!!

The preparation becomes a full time occupation for most of our head office staff for the two weeks prior, and this week is hectic too clearing away, recording all manner of things like pay and mileages.

Festival itself is now a five day job, pretty much 24 hours a day. All our staff and resources are stretched to the limit – being on an Island with boats full we have to make do with the vehicles we have by Tuesday for the event, and staff are similarly unavailable if we have the numbers wrong.

This year we brought in an extra 34 buses and a host of staff from England. The buses need checking over, preparing, fuelling, washing, and of course fetching in the first place. The staff need to be fed, accommodated, briefed and directed throughout.

As ever, the nature and mood of festival goers couldn’t be faulted, and carrying the vast, vast majority of them was a pleasure.

Attention has now turned to returning the 34 buses back to various pars of Southern England, some urgently as they were lent by our sister companies from their regular fleets, some not urgent at all as they are buses displaced by new ones. However, 19 of them are off next week to ‘do Glastonbury’. These need checking over again, ticket fitments removing, cleaning, fuelling and so on before they can depart. 9 are off on Tuesday being collected by mainland drivers, but the other 10 are off next Sunday with our own staff taking them on to Glastonbury and driving them there. The good news for us is that they aren’t coming back – the buses that is!

We’re also beginning to plan for Cowes Week where this year we will be providing the park and ride ‘Sailbus’ service in Cowes, the IW Council having stopped the provision. Our replacement fills the gap and we were happy to do so, though it will cost £1 a trip to cover the costs. We’re hoping to bring open toppers to Cowes for Sailbus this year, if we can find a couple going spare.

We’re also talking with the organizers of some other big events going on this summer, with a view to providing special services at these too. Great news comes for Sandown High School and Ryde High School, who both won through to the National finals of Global Rock Challenge in Sheffield next month – just the job of getting them there and back in seven coaches to sort as I write!

Meanwhile, we will be registering our next timetable change in a couple of weeks’ time, so are busy finalizing the timetables and other details.