Traveling the World: 121 Days, 9 Big Adventures, and 6 Cruises Throughout the Globe

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Things certainly have escalated quickly at the Route to Retire household!

We started with the plan to take a couple of vacations over the next year and suddenly we’re traveling the world for 121 days!

We seem to have this problem – almost a sickness – where we get an idea and tend to go overboard with it. Instead of visiting the country of Panama for a month or two, we lived there for three years (so worth it!)! The next year we decided that RV travel might be fun. Instead of a 2-3 week trip, we moved out of our apartment and hit the road in it for 8 months (glad we did it and glad we’re done with it!).

So yeah, we’ve got problems. It doesn’t matter though, because we’re having a lot of fun regardless!

Even though the thought of traveling the world wasn’t in our plans, things sort of fell into our lap to make it happen. The cost is so crazily low because of how this happened that it’s also not something we could wait on and spread out over a couple of years or more.

So… we’re running with it! We’ll be traveling to Alaska, the Caribbean, Mexico, Panama, and Europe all within the next 12 months. It’s a lot, but we’re super excited for the adventures!

What’s the plan and how did traveling the world happen to fall into our laps? Keep reading to find out!

Traveling the world… the unexpected opportunity

Let’s start with our initial travel plans that we’ve had in place for several months now…

• We already had an MSC Caribbean cruise booked with friends of ours (we should have just wrapped up this one as this post comes out).
• We also had booked an all-inclusive trip to Cancún for this winter using points for everything.
• Then we were fortunate that some of our other friends living in Panama asked us to dog/house-sit again for them next spring for about a month.

I mean, that’s already a pretty nice lineup for some vacationing, right? We didn’t anticipate too much more outside of that (though I’m sure we would have thought of something).

But then it happened. Earlier this year, I talked about The Next Mission… Free Cruises Through Casino Status Matches!

Our expectations weren’t too high for this endeavor. However, after applying for one credit card each and getting matched to Caesars Diamond status, we took a short trip to Atlantic City to get matched from various casinos.

You can read more details of how this worked in my post, Free Cruises with Just a Little Leg Work… Living Like Rock Stars! Unfortunately, this ship might have sailed (nice pun!) for the future since Wyndham Diamond status through their credit card will not grant you Caesars Diamond status. That was a key component to making this work.

Regardless, the offers for free cruises have been rolling in for me and Lisa! So much so that we’re only taking advantage of 6 of them. Crazy, right?

The cruise offers varied…

• Some were inside cabins and some were balcony staterooms.
• Some included free drinks at the casino and some didn’t.
• Some covered all our taxes and fees and some didn’t.
• Some were for trips of 5 days while others were up to as many days as we could fit in (we considered one that was 22 nights throughout the Pacific!).
• All covered 2 guests and allowed us to upgrade to cover a third guest (our daughter).
• Most were geographically bound to where we could go, although the majority provided some great opportunities.

And most importantly, all of these needed to be traveled within a year. Hence the reason we’re turning the next 12 months into our “traveling the world” adventure.

Think of the opportunity here. Although there’s a cost to these cruises, they’re so heavily subsidized that it’s a no-brainer, especially considering how much we love cruising. And now we have the chance to go to places we’ve never been before.

So we started planning… and booking… and booking.

In the end, we’ve lined up 6 cruises over the next 12 months, totaling 51 days on cruise ships. And we’ll be in places like Alaska and Europe that we’ve never been to before. This is going to be awesome!

On top of that, the status match we gained at Ocean Casino in Atlantic City gave us (besides the MSC cruises) a couple of free nights at the Wynn in Las Vegas. Bear in mind that we each got this and my uncle lives out there. We’ll fly out there for free with Southwest miles so we booked this one, too.

And we have a couple of getaway weekend trips with friends and family booked as well.

It’s gonna be a busy year… busy, but exciting!

What trips do we have planned over our 121 days of travel?

Ok, so we’re going to be traveling the world, but what do we actually have planned?

7-night MSC Western Caribbean cruise (9 days w/travel)

We should have just wrapped this cruise up (I wrote this post right before we left for this vacation). This is a typical Western Caribbean cruise hitting Ocean Cay (MSC’s beautiful private island in the Bahamas) and Costa Maya and Cozumel in Mexico.

This is on the MSC Seashore, a ship we’ve been on before and we liked a lot. So I’ve got no problems leaving the beginning of Ohio’s winter season for a week on it again! We got to go with some close friends on this trip so that’s an even bigger bonus.

Spending time at sea, waterslides on the ship, great food, fun activities and shows, and visiting other countries with warm weather… I’m in!

5-Night Margaritaville Islander Cozumel and Progreso cruise (7 days w/travel)

This was one of the first “free” cruises that we were offered (other than the MSC cruise we each received through Ocean Casino) so we were pretty excited. We booked it and now I’m not sure what to expect. I’ve heard that it’s more of an entry-level type of cruise and that the amount of “elegance” isn’t going to blow anyone away.

There’s no cancellation available on this one (or most of the other ones) as they’re “special” packages booked through the ship’s casino. The cruise ran us just under $700 for everything out-the-door for the three of us for a balcony room and free drinks in the casino so not too shabby.

Regardless, it’ll still get us out of Ohio in January so no complaints here. The Islander itinerary takes us back to Mexico to visit Progreso and Cozumel. We’ve never been to Progreso before (and hadn’t even heard of it) so at least we’ll get a new place out of the deal.

6-night Wyndham Alltra Cancun All-Inclusive vacation (8 days w/travel)

Did someone say Mexico? Yup, we’ll be heading back to Mexico next in February for an all-inclusive vacation. We booked this one back in April after we originally had planned to use a bunch of our saved points for a cruise. I posted our plans to the genius people on the Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group. They told me that was a big old waste and that we should get free cruises through status matching instead and use our points for an all-inclusive vacation… so we did.

This will be at the Wyndham Alltra Cancun All Inclusive Resort in Cancun. We’ve never stayed there before but it looks like a good way to spend a week in the winter! As an aside, we’re now Wyndham Diamond members from our credit card so I’ll probably throw that out there to them as well. It probably won’t do anything for us, but it never hurts to ask!

We booked this trip 100% using points. The flights were booked with Southwest miles and the all-inclusive resort was booked with our Chase Reward points.

7-night MSC Seascape Caribbean cruise (9 days w/travel)

We’ve never been on the MSC Seascape before. It’s one of MSC’s newest ships, if not the newest, so I’m looking forward to exploring it in March. I read that it’s similar to the Seashore but slightly upgraded.

As we continue traveling the world, this ship will take us to Ocho Rios (Jamaica), George Town (Cayman Islands), and Cozumel (Mexico).

We’re not cruising alone on this one. We promised Faith that we’d try to get a trip booked where she could bring a friend. So on this one, we booked my free MSC room for the three of us and used Lisa’s free room for her BFF from Panama and her mom (also a friend of ours). Plus, we’ve got our good friends who went to Atlantic City with us (they used one of the free rooms as well). And, we’ve got our friends from Arizona going, too (and they booked using points).

This sounds like a party in the making!

4-night Las Vegas trip (5 days w/travel)

Now, we just couldn’t let our free nights at the Wynn in Las Vegas go to waste. Lisa and I each got two free nights from our upgraded status at Ocean Casino in Atlantic City. They were set to expire in June so we needed to use ’em or lose ’em. We squeezed in a trip in April.

I called their special number and the host took care of us. He lined us up with back-to-back stays in our room (mine and then Lisa’s) at the Encore. He booked us for a panoramic room with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Las Vegas Strip on one of the highest floors. That was covered 100% – no taxes, resort fees, or anything.

Plus, it comes with a $50 dining credit that we each have for most restaurants there. $50 probably won’t get us very far at that place, but it’s still something.

This will likely be more of a laid-back trip where we’ll spend time walking the Strip and spending some time with my uncle. We need to save our $$$ for the other vacations!

31-day Boquete, Panama vacation (33 days w/travel)

Next spring, it’ll be time to continue traveling the world to one of my favorite places… Boquete, Panama!

Our friends (and former neighbors) in Boquete offered us the chance to dog/house-sit for them while they do some traveling of their own. They get someone they know to take care of their dog (and house) and we get a free place to stay in Panama… it’s a win-win! We did this for them a couple of years ago and we’re looking forward to doing it again.

The only substantial cost we’ll have is getting there and back and possibly a beach trip that we might take. We’ve already booked the flights so we’re covered on that end. We’ll figure out the beach trip as we get closer. We love the Show Pony Resort and since we don’t know the next time we’ll be back, it’s pretty tempting to go while we’re there.

It’s always great to see all our old friends there (Panamanians and expats) so I’m really looking forward to that, too. It’s also outside of the rainy season so this will be a great opportunity to do some good hiking, too. Hiking through the cloud forest is just different than other places – it’s got a sort of magic to it that I love.

One month is more than a vacation and that’s what I appreciate about this. We get a chance to live there for a little bit and not just rush through everything.

PS: If the idea of living in Panama intrigues you at all, consider booking a tour through Retire in Panama Tours. The folks that run this are friends of ours and will ensure that you know everything you need to know to determine if Panama’s the right place for you!

7-day Holland America Eurodam Alaska Explorer cruise (9 days w/travel)

Ok, now we’re getting to something a little different for us!

Lisa and I have talked about taking an Alaskan cruise for years. The problem always came down to two things:

• Cost
• Weather

We would decide that we were going to take a cruise in general and then start looking. And then we (mostly me) would think about how the weather for a Caribbean cruise is, well, tropical and an Alaskan cruise isn’t (I’m a freeze baby). Throw in that a Caribbean cruise is ridiculously cheaper than an Alaskan cruise and the tropics have always won out.

But with these free cruises we’re getting (well, heavily discounted cruises), we wanted to make sure we were traveling the world and not just the Caribbean. Holland America is supposed to be one of the better cruise lines for Alaska and so we decided to use our cruise to take advantage of this.

June is a great month to go based on what we read and our busy travel schedule. We booked on the Eurodam, which was USA Today’s 2024 Readers’ Choice for the best Alaskan cruise with a full itinerary of cool places:

• Seattle, Washington
• Puget Sound
• Scenic cruising Stephens Passage
• Juneau, Alaska
• Glacier Bay
• Icy Strait Point, Alaska
• Sitka, Alaska
• Ketchikan, Alaska
• Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
• Seattle, Washington

Now, I will say that this is easily the most expensive trip we’re booking. We decided that since we get one shot at this, we wanted to do it right… and that meant a couple of upgrades. It was free for an inside cabin for me and Lisa so we had to pay for Faith, of course. We upgraded to a balcony because it’s Alaska and we don’t want to miss anything. They also had a running promotion we took advantage of to get free drinks, WiFi, pre-paid gratuities, on-board credit, a free excursion, and more.

Overall, this cruise cost us about $4k – ouch! This is probably almost twice as much as we normally pay for a cruise so this was a tough pill to swallow. But, I priced it out without our “free” cruise offer and it would have been over $8k otherwise. So, for what’s likely going to be our only chance to do this, at least in the foreseeable future, this was worth the price of admission.

2-night Hocking Hills trip (3 days w/travel)

Not much to traveling the world on this one. This will be a nice weekend getaway to Hocking Hills in southern Ohio with all my cousins in July.

We find a new place to go every weekend to just be together, hang out, and laugh our @$$es off. I started this get-together event probably over 25 years ago when there were maybe 10 of us and we would spend the weekend tent camping. People got married, kids have been had, and tastes have changed. Now there are usually around 25 people that make it and we rent out a big house for the weekend.

This time around Hocking Hills won out, which is great. If you’re anywhere within a reasonable drive of Logan, Ohio, and love nature and the outdoors, put Hocking Hills on your list to visit. It’s absolutely beautiful there and a perfect opportunity to appreciate all that nature has to offer.

I’m sure we’ll fit some hiking in and evenings around the campfire for this one. Always such a great time!

2-night Yatesville, Kentucky trip (3 days w/travel)

Speaking of get-togethers, I was so fortunate to have the chance to get together with my old high school gang in Atlanta a few months ago. That had a major impact on me even just thinking about it before I went and wrote the post, Time Is Precious: Rekindling Relationships Is Now a #1 Priority, about my thoughts.

While we were there, we decided to do a weekend getaway together next year. I immediately ran with that and found a place in Yatesville, Kentucky that was roughly centered among all of us who live in different states. Now, I’ve never heard of Yatesville, but the place looks perfect for what we want – a place to hang out, laugh our a$$es, hike, and chill around a campfire. Hmm, that sounds almost like what I talked about that I appreciate about Cousins Weekend!

This trip will be next fall and I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it!

35-day Europe trip (35 days w/travel)

Yeah, Jim, but we need to hear more about traveling the world and less about the States!

I agree and this is the big one for us. We’ve never been to Europe before. One of the biggest reasons is that I struggle on a plane. I’m great for shorter flights and actually love it… but once a flight gets to be more than say 4-5 hours, I start to get antsy and almost claustrophobic. I always joke that if we had to fly somewhere far, after that handful of hours, I’d be the guy who loses it and ends up lying in the aisle with his hands zip-tied behind him and a knee on his back to keep him down.

Lovely thought, right?

So we’ve discussed that if we ever went to Europe, I think an economy seat would be out for me. I’d need a little more – like business class. The problem with business class? Yeah, it’s pretty darn expensive.

So we’ve thrown around the idea of cruising to Europe and back instead. Or maybe cruising one way and flying the other. That would significantly lower the cost (and my anxiety) but it would still be expensive… unless you happen to get a “free” cruise to help subsidize the cost!

When I talked about the free cruise offers that were starting to flow in, there was one that I held high on my list of wants… Princess Cruises. We had done one of these on our honeymoon long ago and another a few years later. You want to talk about top-notch? These were it.

So when we got offered a free Princess cruise, I didn’t want to waste it on the Caribbean. We wanted to do something different with it in our quest to continue traveling the world!

The cool thing was that we also got offered a free Carnival cruise with not much regarding restrictions, so we came up with a plan. Next October, we’ll fly to Europe, take a Princess cruise to visit some places, spend another week traveling on our own, and then take a cruise back to the U.S.

11-Day Sun Princess Mediterranean with Greek Isles, Italy & Turkey

We’ll give ourselves a couple of days after flying from the U.S. to Italy in case of travel mishaps and to get over the jetlag. But then, we’ll jump right onto the Princess cruise for 11 days. This cruise gives us the opportunity to check out some cool places in Europe:

• Civitavecchia (for Rome), Italy
• Naples, Italy (for Capri & Pompeii)
• Santorini, Greece
• Kusadasi, Turkey (for Ephesus)
• Athens (Piraeus), Greece
• Crete (Chania), Greece
• Sicily (Messina), Italy
• Mallorca (Palma), Spain
• Barcelona, Spain

This is on the Sun Princess, Princess’ newest ship that just took its maiden voyage earlier this year. Again, we’ve never been to Europe before so this should be a nice way to touch on some places that maybe we’ll want to spend more time at later the next time we’re traveling the world again.

Traveling Europe for about a week

Once we get off the Princess cruise, we’ll need to decide what we want to do. We’ll have about a week to make our way from Barcelona, Spain back to Civitavecchia (Rome), Italy for our next cruise. We’ve got several options so we’ll need to figure out what makes the most sense. A couple of ideas we briefly tossed around include:

• Making our way over to Portugal and then flying from there to Italy to spend more time.
• Heading up to France and then Switzerland before working our way back down through Italy.

We’ve been too busy getting all the rest of these trips lined up that we haven’t gotten to dig into this further yet, so if you have any thoughts, feel free to let me know in the comments. We do know that we don’t want to overextend ourselves and we’d rather not rent a car if we don’t have to. We’d love to spend time on the train system, too. For now, we’re planning to each only have a carry-on and backpack so hopefully that’ll make our lives a little easier.

We’ll definitely be making use of the Rome2Rio site, too. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s an amazing website that helps you figure out the best options to get from A to B anywhere in the world, be it flying, taking a train, hopping on a bus, renting a car, or taking a boat. It’s an awesome tool and it’s free with no registration needed.

14-Day Carnival Miracle Transatlantic from Civitavecchia (Rome), Italy

Eventually, though, we’ll find ourselves back in Civitavecchia, Italy ready to hop onto our last cruise of our 12 months of traveling the world. This will be on Carnival and I’m not too excited about the ship itself. It’s on the Carnival Miracle, which is about 20 years old. So it probably won’t be the most impressive of all the ships we’ll have been on, especially coming right after the Sun Princess.

However, it’s a transatlantic cruise and that’s something that I’ve wanted to do for years. I love the “at sea” days more than anything and this will give us plenty of those. But we’ll also visit a few other places on the way back as well:

• Civitavecchia (Rome), Italy
• Cartagena, Spain
• Ponta Delgada, Azores
• Nassau, The Bahamas
• Tampa, Florida

And that’ll be it. After that, we’ll take a flight back from Florida to Ohio and try to recover from all this traveling!

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It’s crazy, but all of this amounts to 121 days of travel over 12 months… about 1/3 of a year. Hoofa!

The cost of traveling the world

So how much does 121 days of traveling the world cost?

Well, it’s definitely a lot more than we’re used to spending on travel in a single year.

For the cruises alone, we’re guessing that this should end up coming to less than $16,000. That’s after any unpaid gratuities, drinks, etc. On most of the cruises, we don’t have a drink package, which is why we don’t know the exact number. But I quit drinking more than two years ago so it’s probably not going to be anything crazy. Either way, I’m being ultra-conservative with this so the end number will probably be a lot less.

On the plus side, we have $1,530 in onboard and casino credit coming (maybe we’ll win enough to pay for all the year’s travel! 😉 ). And we’ll save a little money from grocery shopping a lot less since food on the cruises is included.

Regardless, that’s a heckuva lot of money. That said, there’s three of us and we’re spending 51 days on cruise ships and we’ll have a balcony on each of these. That ends up amounting to about $105 per person, per day out the door. That’s an incredible bargain, actually, for what we’re doing.

And 1/4 of that spending ($4k) is coming from our big upgraded Alaska trip, which was pricey but still half of what it would cost otherwise.

The rest of the travel cost really is to be determined. For most of our domestic flights, we’ll be taking advantage of the miles and Companion Pass we’re earning that I talked about a couple of weeks ago in my Southwest Companion Pass: Why Now’s the Best Time to Act post. So those flights should be next to nothing.

And, as soon as we finish getting the Southwest Companion pass (probably in January), we’ll be working on earning as many Chase points as we can to cover or subsidize the business class flights we want to take for the one-way flight to Europe. That’ll likely be through the Chase business Ink cards that tend to offer some much higher sign-up bonuses.

I can’t mention enough how beneficial the free Travel Freely website and app are for tracking your credit card bonuses and finding the right cards to earn even more free travel!

This will be a year where the Priority Pass membership we get for free from our Capital One Venture X card will get a ton of use!

We also have some Capital One Rewards points and quite a number of Wyndham points from the Wyndham credit cards we earned to get these “free” cruises in the first place. These points might be useful in paying for some of the places we’ll need to stay during the week in Europe in between the two cruises.

But it won’t all be covered and I’m sure we’ll be shelling out some good $$$ to pay for a lot of this. I think that’s ok nonetheless. In my recent The Funny Thing About Sequence of Returns Risk… post, I talked about how we could probably loosen up the reins a little bit. Well, here’s our opportunity.

Plus, I have a feeling that after a year of traveling the world, we’re going to want to take a little break and take things down a notch the following year. Of course, you never know! 😉

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’re already on my mailing list. I’ll keep you in the know when new posts come out and talk about some things I don’t discuss in the blog. Plus, I’ll send you over some cool spreadsheet freebies I think you’ll really enjoy just for signing up…

Plan well, take action, and live your best life!

Thanks for reading!!

— Jim