Last weekend, I used one of the last sunny, relatively warm days we are likely to see before June to take a sightseeing cruise among the Thousand Islands.

No, this does not involve dressing. We were all nude.

Kidding! We wore thermal thongs.

This involves getting on a boat in Kingston, Ontario, for a three-hour tour.

(Sing it with me, "Gilligan" fans: A three-hour tour.)

There are few places as heart-stoppingly gorgeous as the Thousand Islands.

The recorded tour told the Iroquois legend about how the islands came to be. The Great Spirit told the squabbling local tribes (Seneca, Mohawk, Oneida and other fine home furnishings) that if they'd quit poking each other and behave, he'd give them paradise.

As any parent with a minivan knows, the truce lasted about 10 minutes. When the tribes began fighting again, the disgusted Great Spirit gathered up paradise in a buffalo hide and was hauling it back up into the sky when the hide broke. Little fragments of paradise rained down into the St. Lawrence River -- 997 idyllic scraps, to be exact, or around 1,800 if you count rocks, shoals and slow beavers.

The narrated tour was often even more interesting than the chatty European exchange students from the local university who were planning their next excursion to the United States. If you think it's a pain to get across the U.S.-Canada border as an American citizen in good standing, you should try doing it as a Belgian on a student visa in a rental car with a case of Moosehead in the trunk. Or so I've overheard.

The recording was a dialogue between Standard Audio Tour Narration Voice Lady and Sir John A. Macdonald, a former Canadian prime minister with a thick Scots accent. The narration broadcast throughout the boat was in English, but it was also available through headphones in a half-dozen other languages, which made me wonder how you do a thick Scots accent in Mandarin without choking.

Shortly after introducing himself, the disembodied voice of Sir John explains, "Now, clearly, I've been dead since 1891," an admission you're unlikely to hear outside an early-bird buffet.

I was actually paying attention to the narration, because when I learn tedious facts and bits of history I can pass them on to you. Then we both feel smarter.

But Audio Tour Narration Lady kept getting bogged down by the dead Scotsman because he didn't know what metric measurements were.

"What in the world is a … a kilometer?" he would burr, and patient Tour Lady would say, "A kilometer is six-tenths of a mile, Sir John. You see, Canada has adopted the metric system, in which all measurements are divisible by 10 blah blah blah" -- and suddenly I was back in fifth grade, learning the metric system because America was about to adopt it too.

Ha.

All we got out of that sham was bottles. We've all learned to make room in the fridge for 2 liters of soda at a time, but have you noticed your shampoo comes in a 16.9-ounce bottle? It's a secret metric infiltration. You didn't realize you were buying a half-liter, did you? And we laughed at the idea of the commies messing with our vital fluids.

A Canadian friend of mine was in England when the UK decimalized its money. Nobody could make change.

Our decimal money has colorful names, at least; we don't call a dime a decidollar or a 10-dollar bill a kilopenny.

This is not what I wanted to be thinking about on that cruise, among cottages and pines and shades of Iroquois in canoes, smoking fish, and smugglers and spies sneaking across the international border.

We never even got to the story of how the wife of a fishing guide experimenting with ketchup, mayonnaise and pickle relish created a new substance embraced by salad lovers everywhere.

Now available in 16.9-ounce bottles.

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