The other day my wife booked us on a cruise for later in the year to a very exotic locale, to a part of the world I’ve actually never seen - mysterious, fabled and remote Maine and Eastern Canada. We’ll spend a couple of days in Manhattan and then sail north. Cruises are terrific because it’s jail with the chance of drowning and you get to eat 16 meals a day. Among the entertainments is the de rigueur art auction at sea which uniformly features crap works that sell at high prices to wide-eyed tourists hallucinating from their visit to the all-you-can-eat chocolate fountain/raw bar. We’ll be on a ship of the Norwegian line, the captain will be Greek, the first mate Australian, the crew Filipino and the boat registered in the Bahamas and there won’t be a Scandinavian in sight. My history with cruises is slight, but here it is.
My first such voyage was courtesy of my then-employer GE Capital sailing from Stockholm to St Petersburg on the Baltic Sea, which was gray, cold, bleak and grim. It turned out this was excellent preparation for when we met our Russian hosts.
We visited the Hermitage Museum founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great and home to magnificent works of art. It was a shock, however, to see masterworks therein near open windows getting splashed on by pelting rains and jostled about by high winds, but hey, it’s Russia.
My next cruise was a couple of years ago, this one to the Caribbean. A large group of Polish speakers from Chicago made up most of the passengers, leaving Leesa and me among the few Anglophones on board. I enjoyed this hugely because my Polish vocabulary grew from 12 to 23 words by the trip’s end. Dziękuję przyjacielu!
So Mrs Oliver and I shall be seagoing yet again in a couple of months.
Dramamine, an anti-nausea OTC medicine, is owned by the Prestige Consumer Healthcare Corporation which is traded under the stock symbol PBH on the NYSE.
I recommend you heavy-up on their shares in the coming weeks. It represents a significant buy opportunity, especially when I hit the chocolate fountain/raw bar after a couple of martinis.
I think most of the “fabulous art” are copies of LeRoy Neiman pieces, which all look alike anyway! So buy loads between the martini bar and the chocolate fountain bar.
I thank you for the tip!