Today we are docking in Olbia, Sardinia. I don’t know much about Sardinia. I have seen a James Bond movie where he goes there, but I think he’s on the Costa Smeralda where the rich folks hang out. It’s not like we’re going there.

In the tradition Amy and I set of picking out excursions where there is either food or wine involved, we picked out the Gnocchetti, Sardi and Ravioli excursion. Its description reads: Discover the art of making authentic Italian pasta and uncover Sardinia's fascinating past at the Ethnographic Museum. I don’t know about the Ethnographic Museum but I’m all over the authentic Italian pasta.

We meet for the excursion in the Sessions bar, the one we don’t mess with. I went up the aft staircase to get some yogurt from Goofy’s, a banana, and diet Coke, not to mention filling up the water bottle they gave me in Palermo from the water tap at the drink station. Then I went down to Sessions to meet Amy.

We learn we have two buses going on this excursion, and our designated crew member is none other than Pubmaster Paul, who is probably going along for the pasta. He says hello and yells something at us about Scrabble. They give him the Mickey paddle to lead us out to the bus.

When we get on our bus, we end up sitting in the second row, but at a spot where the window is blocked by a partition between that window and the one in front of it. Amy has a bit of window, but I have lost the ability to take photos over her head. So when the bus pulls out, I moved to the front seat behind the driver. These buses have huge windshields and you can see a lot out of those.

Our tour guide is Dominick, and he is British. His father is Sardinian. He’s come to live in his father’s homeland and got a job as a tour guide. So we don’t have any problem with his English. He doesn’t like to stand on the bus and talk to us, so he sits in the jump seat by the driver and uses the microphone. What he says is pretty interesting – I remember the part about the law they passed in Sardinia that said if you build a fence around a plot of land, it’s yours…so all of a sudden they got lots of people building these low granite fences.

Sardinia is really scenic and we’re driving way high up into the mountains. There are little picturesque villages stuck up into the mountains. Dominick says they raise a lot of sheep here and one of the most famous exports is sheep cheese. He also talks about the local liqueur, Mirto, which is made from myrtle berries. They hand pick the berries, soak them for up to 6 months, and add water and sugar. Yikes.

After we drive a lot through the hills, we arrive at a mustard-colored farmhouse and are let out of the bus. The other bus got there first and they’re already inside. The gal who works there, Francesca, comes out and they decide we’re not all going to fit in the room they have for us, so some of us will end up joining the group from the first bus. They pull Amy and I out and we are stuck at the end of a table with a guy whose family is at another table. He keeps running away to see what they're doing.

At this table they have a wad of pasta dough for each of us, a paper chef’s hat and apron, and some pasta tools like a cutter and a ridged wooden board. There is also a chef at our table. He doesn’t speak any English but he shows us how to cut the dough, roll it, then put a piece on the ridged board and roll it into a gnocchi. He does it expertly, but I keep messing up. He at least knows the word "no" and he has to come over and show me how to roll the gnocchi. Of course I get better at it with practice.

I’m better at making ravioli. All you do there is roll the pasta out, cut it, put some cheese on it, fold it over and cut it into shapes. The chef doesn’t want us to leave any pasta for some reason. We have to keep making ravioli until we use it all up. I end up with four ravioli in various shapes. Someone causes a stir by making Mickey Mouse ravioli.

When that’s done, Amy and I make a break for the bathroom. We manage to be first in line. This is good, because they take us outside to set up for dinner. We all get to mill around outside the farmhouse and listen to a group of men singing Sardinian folk songs. I take some pictures. I was standing on a low granite wall to take pictures and I knocked a rock out of it. Well, it’s just a rock…but it has probably been there for centuries and here comes this big galumphing American and knocks it out. Of course I tried to put it back. I think Amy and Paul were laughing at me. Eventually a guy named George who speaks perfect English takes us to pick rosemary, saying that in Italy they use it as an ornamental shrub rather than an herb, and then takes us over to see a cork tree.

The tree is crawling with so many bugs that Amy doesn’t go up to it, but I do. I am immediately attacked by butterflies. Butterflies hate me. Paul starts asking who is coming to the Canada Day celebration he wants to have in Diversions tonight. Amy and I say we’ll go. We’re the only ones apparently.

George takes us back to the lawn in front of the farmhouse. The men sing some more songs. The young one with the guitar isn’t bad-looking so that’s okay. Finally they let us back in. They’ve set up the porch with tables so we sit at one.

A family with a kid about 5 or 6 sits across from us. The kid’s name is Brian and he’s talkative. We now find out the Sardinians don’t believe in air conditioning; it was hot outside and it’s hot in here. I don’t get hot easily but I am starting to miss Disneyland Paris. I have paper fans in my backpack, so I break them out.

On the table is a basket of flatbread and some very dense white bread and a jug of red wine. We also have fresh olive oil and some grated cheese. Here’s what I did: Take some olive oil on a plate and add pepper and cheese. Swab the bread in it. Eat. Okay, I ate the whole basket of bread pretty much.

Then they bring out trays of gnocchetti (the professional ones, not the pitiful ones I made) in tomato sauce. Someone (probably Paul, he's sitting behind us) notes that it looks like a bowl of grubs. Despite that, and the fact that it sort of does look like a bowl of grubs, I eat loads of it. Next is some sort of fried meat with lemon slices. I try it out and it’s beef, so Amy doesn’t have any. They also deliver a salad, so she had that. I had one piece of fried beef. By that time I am probably going to collapse from food intake.

Then they give us little shots of Mirto. That stuff will knock you down and put you out. I think they use it in airplanes. To fuel the plane, not to put the passengers to sleep, although it might have that effect.

For the coup de grace, Dominick walks around and hands everybody a recorder with Sardinia written all over it. Now it’s time to begin the Sardinian Whistle Torture. A roomful of kids (and Paul) with recorders can’t be a good thing. Brian across from us can actually play tunes on his. Turns out he is a saxophonist. His dad, thankfully, tells him he can’t play it on the bus.

So we go staggering out to the bus and ride into a little town to visit the Ethnographic Museum.

There are stunning views of the mountains on the path we take to the museum. What a trip it must be to live there and have that view all the time. Although did I mention that Sardinia doesn’t believe in air conditioning?

We have a guide in authentic traditional Sardinian dress to take us through the museum. She has bells on her sleeves. Apparently the women would wear bells so people could hear them coming. Okay, whatever. Dominick translates for her. But there are a lot of us, and the museum is a farm and house. The rooms are very small and very hot and I know I’m punchy from lunch. Eventually we are in a room that is part of the farmhouse, and there are a lot of farm implements in there. The guide is talking about how to make cheese. A kid wants to know what they have an axe for. The kids say the only place they see an axe is in Nightmare on Elm Street. There I go, asking the kids "Haven’t you kids ever been to a farm before?" The kids say no. They don’t think you can do anything with an axe but chop people’s heads off. So they are getting an education while they are hot and tired in the Ethnographic Museum.

What ends up happening is that eventually Amy and Paul and I start hanging back and trading jokes. Cork was never so funny.

Finally we are given some water and a bathroom break. I went back to the water to fill up my bottle. While I am standing there, a guy who works there gives me a huge bottle of water. So I lug that out to the bus. Paul thinks I stole it. I think he just wishes he had it.

We turn the AC vents up as far as we can get them and ride back to the ship. Dominick doesn’t say much. He does put on a tape that talks about Rome since we’re going there tomorrow. We arrive at the ship about 4 or so and make a break for the shower.

Tonight is the Castaway Club gathering so we got into the dinner clothing and went down to Beat Street. Turns out that this time there are no free drinks (not with alcohol in them anyway) and no Eazy Cheez canapes like we got on the PC cruise. I complained about the canapes but I sort of miss them even though I am not really hungry. Rockin Bar D is pretty full. We're sitting in the overflow room in Diversions. The oddest part of that is the fact that Brent is in Rockin Bar D and he is asking questions of the audience and you want to answer him, and then you realize he can't hear you. All we have is Peter from Switzerland with a microphone.

Peter has a microphone only because there is going to be a drawing for some clocks. Before you enter the drawing you are supposed to do a mix and mingle exercise that you fill out on a card; you have to find people who were on an inaugural cruise (we put ourselves down for the inaugural Panama Canal cruise) and who had been on more than 10 cruises (we put down one of our tablemates from dinner and a couple of people we saw posting on the DIS because they didn't say the people actually had to be in the room) and so on. So we managed to do the exercise without meeting any fellow cruisers, except for the guy who was surveying everybody looking for inaugural cruisers and didn't think the first PC cruise counted.

Brent did the drawings over in Rockin Bar D and whenever he pulled out a card, Peter would take his microphone and chant "Di-ver-sions, Di-ver-sions" in hopes that the winner would be from our overflow room, and it must have sounded like the voice of God or something in the other room because Brent looked pretty relieved when the winner actually did come from Diversions. There were ten winners and a pretty good number of them were sitting in the overflow room. Only one weird thing happened - Brent was having kids come up and pull the cards for the drawing, and at one point up walks a girl about 10 years old in a string bikini. It looked odd on the monitor - who'd bring a kid in a bikini to an event like this?

We didn't win any clocks so we finished our Diet Coke and left. As we walked out, Peter was in the hallway and he was saying to everyone walking out "Sorry you didn't win the clock. Sorry you didn't win the clock." He says that to the gal behind us and she says "But I did win the clock."

We went to the theater to see The Art of the Story. This is one of the new shows. The first number is an all-out song and dance presentation of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Then they showcase Mulan and Tarzan and have a very strange Beauty and the Beast number. I get the musical number part, which is mostly devoted to Gaston, but then they show about 15 minutes of video from the movie. The last number is from the Lion King musical, one of the songs that does not appear in the movie, and it's good to see them showcasing that.

We’ve already promised to go to Canada Day in the pub and now we have to show up, so that’s where we went before dinner. It was semiformal night, so we went semiformally. Canada Day consists of a big Canadian flag hanging up in the room, hockey trivia and the Canadians, Paul and Andy from the cruise staff, interviewing fellow Canadians. The volunteer interviewees were two boys around 12 of whom Andy asked questions about their favorite hockey players, while Paul tried to set them up with the young women on the cruise staff ("She’s not much older than you.") There wasn’t any Canadian beer offered, so I had a Boddington’s. We had to get up and sing Oh Canada. The only part of that I know is "Oh Canada."

We had dinner although I am sure I couldn’t eat much after that lunch. Then we went to 70s night in Rockin Bar D. Amy went in before I did. She said I missed seeing Paul run in wearing the Canadian flag and calling himself Super Canadian.

70s Night was rocking and fun. We stayed through the Village People bit. When the live band came out we got out of there.