Don't Want to Drive Your Beast of Burden

Andrew may have beaten me to putting up his blog for this past weekend - but because I have waited to put in my entry it will appear on top of his, and therefore be the first one people read. (Gotcha there honey, thought you had outsmarted me! Hahah! - Oh great, I broke a nail!)
Anyhoo - moving on to Saturdays event. I was hired by the event company we both work for to go to Stratford Upon Avon for one of our famous whiskey and cheese samplings. I arrived at the office to pick up my driver and vehicle at 5:30 a.m. I was just in time to watch the sun rise slowly off in the distance. My driver, Steve from Australia, arrived around 6:00 a.m. and we set about getting the vehicle - The Beastie to be precise. Now, if none of you remember, The Beastie is a converted VW van that has been transformed into a leather/fake fur lounge of sorts for the tastings. Although really cool looking it is very much like a Jimmy Choo shoe: Worth lots of money, looks great, but not that great in the 'something to get you there and back' department.
We move the Beastie over to the lauding bay to pack it up and then try to start it up again. And again. And again. Nothing - the think won't start even though we just moved it less than 10 minutes ago. So what do I do? I reach into my trusty purse and pull out my rosary (which I now always carry) and places it over the rear view mirror. The Beastie starts again and we are off.
Until we reach the gas station to fill her up.
We fill up the tank and try to start it up again but no amount of Hail Marys will work.
So I get out of the Beast to see if there is anything I can do (push it, kick it, throw a fit) and notice that there is a VERY large leak happening from the fuel tank.
PANIC!
(Really, a gas leak is not the best thing to have at a gas station - especially with petrol costing as much as it does.)
After several frantic phone calls to the garage and a pile of sand we are told that yes, there is a gas leak in the fuel tank and yes, they knew about it and no, we were't supposed to fill up the tank anymore than halfway.
Two hours later we arrive in Stratford about 2 hours early (Surprising because the Beast does not go over 55 miles per hour and we had ALOT of dirty looks on the highway.) and we walk around a bit seeing as we have 2 hours before any of the shops or museums open up which will mean customers. Stratford is just as cute as I remember it, and all the people I ran into were lovely. I invited the shopkeeps to come out and try abit of the whiskey or cheese if they got a chance and marvelled at where we were set up: directly across from Shakespeares Birth Place. Could you get a better location?
We did the tastings from roughly 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and encountered French tourists (I was the only one of my group that understood & could speak with them), Chinese & Japanese tourists (took lots of pictures of the Beast) and some Canadians too! (I shook hands with each of them, had my photo taken with them and when asked where they were from the majority replied: B.C.)
At 5 Steve & I packed up The Beast and some of the left over cheese and headed off back to London. Not only did we get there and back on one tank of gas (and may I had many more honks and shouts at our speed!) but the rosary also stayed on the rear view mirror the entire trip.
Until we got back to London, unpacked, locked up and I was half way back to the Tube station before I remembered that it was still in the Beast!