When people think of cruises they think of a short three day trip to the Bahamas or an eight night cruise around the Caribbean.  Some people even think of a ten day cruise to Hawaii or maybe a two week junket to Alaska or Europe.  But a cruise that lasts for over one hundred days hitting ports of call on four different continents and skirting around a fifth?  Yep – they do exist.

As veteran cruisers with Carnival my wife and I get a lot of stuff in the mail from other cruise companies that fall under the Carnival Corporation banner.  One of those is Holland America Line.  The brochure was filled with long … long … LONG cruises.  Some were as short as a month but their Grand World Voyage package (on board the ms Amsterdam) sales around the world in one hundred and eleven days starting from Ft. Lauderdale and ending up in Seattle or Los Angeles.   And if you have almost a third of a year to kill you too can take advantage of this massively long trip setting sail on January 6^th, 2010.

Oh, and the cost?  Well with special savings the trip will only cost you somewhere between $16,599 for an inside cabin deep within the bowels of the ship up to $60,999 for a deluxe suite.  Of course that doesn’t even include walking around money as you will sail through the Panama Canal, down the west coast of South America, cruise around the tip of Antarctic, travel around the horn of Africa, make stops in India, all over eastern Asia and then head home to the west coast of North America.  Stops include Buenos Aires, Panama City, Cape Town South Africa, Mumbai India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Osaka and Tokyo.

Taking into account expenses you could blow through a large chunk of your savings and all in all, a trip like this in one on which you can easily spend more money than some third world countries have as GDP in a year.  It is not something my wife or I would be doing any time soon, but it certainly is to be of interest to a narrow set of people with a lot of time and money on their hands as perhaps a once in a lifetime experience.   Me personally?  I would rather pay off my house, my student loans and my car before dropping that kind of cash on a cruise.

But not many people say that they have sailed around the world and with the current economic downturn continuing prices are lower than they normally would be or at least were a few years ago for such an excursion to lots of exciting destinations that I am sure many people would love to visit in their lifetime.