Cruise to Middle Earth
As a big fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, one of my favorite parts of the movies is the spectacular scenery of New Zealand. It could almost get top billing. Celebrity cruises will sail this winter to New Zeland with its Mercury ship and then next winter with the larger Millennium. While these cruises are exciting in themselves, the Travel Store is adding a Pre-Cruise and Cruise excursion package to the Millennium Voyage called “Cruise to Middle Earth.”
Parts of the package can be purchased a la carte. Some of the offerings of the tours include tours of the set of “The Shire”, numerous “Rhohan” locations, “Helms Deep”, and even a tour of “Edorus”, ie Lyttleton, escorted by Brett Beattie, who doubled as Gimli for John Rhys Davies for 159 days on set.
The only draw back of the package is the price. The 14 day cruise plus 6 day land tour is well over $5000 per person and that doen’t include most meals during the land tour, on board cruise expenses like alchohol and tipping, and air fare. A little bit pricey for a family vacation, but If I suddenly come into a small fortune, I am definitely booking this trip.
If you are interested you can see full details on the trip on : Ultimate Journey to Middle Earth
Loading ...
Oh, I would love to go on this cruise. $5,000 is a lot (and I won’t be cruising down there this winter, hah), but I think it’d be worth it for a cruise that is 14 days long and has a 6-day land tour included. I’ve never been to that part of the world, and I’d love to see that scenery from the movies.
For a 20 day trip, the 5k is really pretty reasonable especially when you consider that the 6 day land tour includes things like helicopter flights and other luxery items. When you average it out it comes to about $250 per person per day to start which is similar to luxury cruise prices.
If it was just me that I was paying for, and I had a chance to save up for a couple of years this would be very do-able, but there is no way that I could do a trip like this and not take my kids. My son has only watched each of the movies about 100 times, and he loves playing the Lord of the Rings strategy game that we have. So for the 4 of us to do a trip like this it would end up being over $20K.
My neighbors used to live in New Zealand, and last year they took a trip back to visit old friends. Their pictures were spectacular, but believe it or not they have never seen the LOTR movies.