David charges around the Clipper Adventurer’s lounge unraveling a roll of toilet paper. He seriously wants us to grasp our insignificance. Starting 600,000,000 years ago at the baby grand piano, David unrolls his way past the sofa which curves around the room beneath the windows. Aft, near the appetizers—genuine Cornish pasties and shrimp cocktail—he makes it into the Paleozoic period. People swivel around in their club chairs to watch him encircle a leather-wrapped pillar somewhere in the Mesozoic period. Forward, at the mahogany bar, the dinosaurs appear. Five steps across the dance floor and he’s hard by the baby grand when mankind shows up. We’re the last half of the last piece of toilet paper on the roll. I think I’ll have another pasty.

David is David Dallmeyer, a professor of geology at the University of Georgia. His toilet paper gig actually does help explain the earth's timeline. He goes on about how the land slides over itself, closes in oceans and makes new continents. It’s Clipper's non-yawn version of plate tectonics. Moreover, David is only one of the five experts that the Clipper Cruise Line has enlisted to help us—the 80 passengers—enrich our discoveries of castles and gardens. We’re cruising the Celtic fringe of Wales, Ireland, southwestern England and Brittany; places the Celts fled to and held after the Romans invaded Britain.

Late this afternoon the Adventurer left Saint Michael's Mount, just off England’s Cornish coast. Now, we’re crossing the English Channel to explore the Mount’s sister abbey, Mont-St-Michel near St. Malo on the coast of Brittany. Then it’s on to Honfleur to check out two major invasions: the Norman invasion of England in 1066, as stitched in the Bayeux tapestry, and the 1945 allied invasion of France at the D-day beaches. Starting in Dublin last week, we’ve cruised the Irish Sea, stopping to explore sites in Wales and Southern Ireland; then crossed the Celtic Sea and discovered some island gems in the English Channel.

Toasting our experts and ourselves, talk turns to the day’s finds: tropical gardens on the Isles of Scilly and Saint Michael's Mount where lush gardens surround a castle perched on top of a rocky mount. Lord St. Levan (a.k.a. John St Aubyn) the current owner was there to greet us: "In the Civil War between the King and Parliament, my family were on the side of Parliament and we were appointed military Governor [of St Michael’s] in 1647. Then, we rather wisely changed sides when the King was restored to his throne in 1660," the tall, angular Lord dressed in navy sport coat recounted. We were sipping our wine in the Castle’s parish room, admiring the family paintings and meeting St Aubyn’s wife who was quite properly attired in a  wool skirt and sweater.

The St. Aubyn's own rooms in the castle are genuine shabby chic, down to the stereo perched on a cardboard box. In the church, St Aubyn delightedly demonstrates the  bells, "I’ll just play a peal. I won’t play it for long, I don’t want everyone to come to church." That’s when it clicks—the 25 people plus the 4 St. Aubyns who live on this island are indeed a small community.

Our cocktail chatter is interrupted by our lively, red-headed kingpin, Leslie Davis. She is attempting to start our evening news. Each of our experts will add something of interest to the day’s events and Leslie will prep us for tomorrow. The word is life jackets on right after breakfast for the zodiac ride to St Malo.

Our zodiacs (large motorized rubber rafts) can take us almost anywhere. They eliminate the large docks and deep waters the big ships require. In fact, if we have passed another cruise ship on this journey, I missed it. The not-so-secret, two-fisted zodiac handshake makes the rafts easy to board. They’re lots of fun. Off the Welsh coast the other day we spotted some seals, actually our seal expert (and film-maker/naturalist) Tony Soper spotted them. The zodiac zooped over and we got an  up-front-and-personal look.

Clipper experts are hybrid passengers, sometimes they teach and sometimes they're just one of us. This way, we not only benefit from their lectures, but also end up in long discussions with them on anything from Irish ghosts to the breeding habits of gannets.

The experts, however, aren’t the only interesting people on this cruise and not the only experts either. My fellow passengers also have tales to tell. Take, for example, my first night at dinner it became apparent that six out of eight of us had lived in, not just visited, Thailand. One man, an army doctor, entertained us with stories of his stint as head of the Mash unit in Korea. "It really was that nutty," he said.

Hailing from all parts of America, most passengers are over 50 and many have many speak at least one other language. Not you’re average tourists. The younger and less worldly, however, fit right in—a curious mind is the only prerequisite. Those in search bingo, badminton and blackjack need not apply.

The Adventurer’s Captain, Alexander Golubev is also intriguing. A Russian from Odessa, he seems as if he might have just stepped out of an updated Pasternak novel. In his middle years, he’s  skilled, dashing and cosmopolitan. To stay fit, he brings his ten-speed bicycle on board and takes 40 to 50 kilometers rides while we’re in port. He’s slowed down recently, he admits, due to a nasty fall he had speeding down the slope of a Chilean fjord.

The Adventurer herself has a Russian ancestry. She started life as the Alla Tarassov. Named after a famous Russian actress, she was used as a ferry, a troop ship and for short leisure cruises. After the Soviet Union broke-up, she was leased to tour companies. Then, in 1997 Clipper Cruise Line, impressed by her genial demeanor, bought her. She’s been completely done over and very attractively so.

The Adventurer has an ice-strengthened hull and special navigation equipment to maneuver safely in the Artic, Antarctica and Greenland where she often cruises. Capt. Golubev didn’t come with the ship, but he does have considerable experience with iceberg-laden waters. Learning that icebergs can't always be picked up by radar, I ask the Captain how he avoids titanic events while surrounded by fog and icebergs. He leans back, crosses his arms over his chest for emphasis and declares, "I stop and wait for better conditions."

No problem there. The Adventurer is a great place to hang out. She's pretty and personable, has lots of amenities, yet never requires dressy get-ups or formal decorum. My cabin has two comfortable bunks, an ocean view and a small bathroom with a shower, toilet, and sink. The library’s full of easy chairs, game tables and books about all the places the Adventurer travels. The Clipper Club is a lounge by day and a pub at night. In our window-wrapped dining room we enjoy good food and company. Tea, coffee and juices are available all the time. We’re waited on by friendly staff while conversing with captivating companions and sipping good wine. Frankly, I could happily tarry a rather long spell on The Clipper Adventurer. Indeed, I’m hoping to spend a few whole sheets of the toilet roll of my life doing just that.