In addition to proving that Keillor has without question one of the greatest jobs in the world, the cruise sounds like an excellent voyage simply from the standpoint of cruise vacations. The journey begins in Amsterdam and travels along the coast of Portugal and Spain, concluding in Barcelona, that grand metropolis on the Mediterranean Sea. After setting sail, the ship will be at sea for two days, and then it stops at Vigo, Spain, where the crew will enjoy fresh olives in the many tapas bars of this Spanish fishing port, according to the dream itinerary that Keillor has posted on the website of A Prairie Home Companion.

The ship will next visit Lisbon, Spain, which the group will explore for a day (Aug. 22), and then moves on to the ancient Spanish cities of Cádiz and Seville for an overnight stay the following day (Aug. 23 – 24). On the 25th, they will arrive in Tangier, Morocco to explore the expansive markets of this city, and then for the rest of the voyage they will make stops exclusively in Spain. They will first see, on the 26th, the Moorish castles and the Picasso museum in Málaga, which will be followed by an entire day at sea (the 27th). On the second to last day of the trip, the group will visit Valencia and its beautiful beaches and gardens, and then will at last arrive to Barcelona the following morning.

The cruise seems to be first and foremost a European cultural adventure, but during the trip there will be plenty of the staples that people have come to expect from A Prairie Home Companion cruises, including a daily glee club, dance lessons, and, naturally, evenings filled with storytelling.

There are still some tickets left, but the majority are sold out, so you should act quickly if you are interested in joining Keillor on what will inevitably be an amazing cruise experience. Both the high-end and low-end cabins are fully booked, so you’ll have to grab one of the middle-of-the-road tickets, financially speaking, if you want to partake, and these cost anywhere from nearly $7,000 to under $2,000, depending on how many people are in your party. (If you are traveling solo, you’ll pay more because you won’t be able to split the expense of your cabin with anyone else.)

The 2012 cruise comes after five previous voyages, all to different parts of the globe. The cruises started in 2005 and went till 2007. A three-year break followed, but the voyages resumed in 2010 with a cruise to the Western Caribbean, and then there was a trip last year that centered on Canada. It sounds like a pretty awesome tradition.

You can find more information about the 2012 cruises here:

A Prairie Home Companion Cruise 2012

The attraction of whale watching cruises lies primarily in the fact that in taking such a voyage, you get to combine two cool activities: sailing the ocean and seeing one of the great creatures of the sea. Plenty of people are into taking cruises, so it stands to reason that quite a few people would also want to enhance their cruising experience by supplementing it with a specific purpose, like seeing whales. Basically, a whale watching cruise is a kind of two-for-one deal.

To be sure, any cruise is going to involve more than the mere experience of sitting on a ship in the ocean. If you are on a big cruise ship run by one of the major cruise lines (like, say, Carnival), you’ll be eating at nice restaurants, going to the spa, gambling in the casino, and so on. So, properly speaking, any cruise vacation is a two-for-one deal, but the difference with whale watching cruises is that you are dedicated to a particular goal; you are not just filling the hours at sea with an endless string of activities. By extension, whale watching cruises are purposive, and do not merely serve as a relaxing escape, as is so often the case with more traditional cruise vacations.

For this reason, whale watching cruises are structured differently than other cruises that you might take with a major cruise line. They are often very short, sometimes lasting only a few hours (e.g., there is a popular whale watching cruise in Boston Harbor that lasts a mere three hours), which of course means that you will not be sleeping on the boat as you would during a regular cruise vacation. There are whale watching cruises that last for several days, but even these multiple-day voyages are fundamentally different from normal cruises because, again, you don’t sleep on the cruise ship itself. When you are out on the ocean, your goal is to see whales, plain and simple, and then you come to shore. This means that major cruise lines, with their enormous ships that hold several thousand people, don’t offer whale watching cruises at all. You may see a whale on a cruise vacation through one of these big cruise lines, but this would be purely incidental.

This last point has implications for how you go about booking a whale watching cruise. Rather than using one of the major travel sites (e.g., Travelocity) to find a cruise, as many cruise enthusiasts do, you’ll likely have to look for individual outfits that specifically offer cruises centered on seeing whales, and book through them. The most efficient way to do this is to search online for whale watching cruises in whatever area interests you. And this gives rise to one final aspect of whale watching cruises that is worth mentioning: you can’t find whales everywhere (obviously), so if you want to go on a cruise to see whales, you’ll have to travel to a place where there are frequent whale sightings, like California or Alaska.

That covers the basics of whale watching cruises. Keep checking All About Cruises and More for additional articles about whale watching cruises that explore specific aspects of this unique form of cruising.

There are a number of sources to turn to when attempting to find the best of the best in the cruise industry. For example, we recently ranked the top cruise lines according to Condé Nast. To determine the best new cruise ship, we looked at a few different sources, like Cruise Critic, a website with tons of cruise industry-related content, including lots of reviews submitted by passengers. (For more information on similar sites, check out our article on cruise critics and cruise reviews.) Cruise Critic put together a list of the “top new ships,” although their selection criteria is a little bizarre because this list contains both recently released ships and soon-to-be-released ships, as opposed to one or the other. We’re concerned with the cruise ships that are already out sailing, so we’ll select the best cruise ship from this set.

Cruise Critic employs a percentage system, in conjunction with a star rating, to rank cruise ships, such that the cruise ships with the most positive reviews submitted by passengers get the highest percentage assigned to them. Ships also get one to five stars – the more stars the better. A lot of websites that focus on the cruise industry, like Cruises Only, use similar ranking systems (smiley faces are used instead of stars, though), whereas other sites simply compile passenger reviews without assigning any specific rating (in stars, smiley faces, etc.) to a ship.

Based on a few of these websites, the following three ships emerged as some of the best new ships: Celebrity Silhouette, Allure of the Seas, and Oasis of the Seas. Other new ships that were highly rated include the Carnival Magic and the Norwegian Epic.

Of these ships, the Celebrity Silhouette seemed to come out on top. It received very favorable review on a few sites (e.g., five stars on Cruise Critic and five smileys out of six on Cruises Only), and for this reason, we crown the Celebrity Silhouette the best new cruise ship, or in any case it is one of the top new ships (ratings are constantly being updated, so the top ship of today may well be supplanted by another tomorrow). At 122,400 tons and with a passenger capacity of 2,886, according to Celebrity Cruises’ website, Celebrity Silhouette is a fairly large ship that started sailing in the middle of July 2011. One of its coolest features is the Lawn Club Grill, an outdoor venue which allows passengers to select a cut of meat, which they then get to grill alongside a chef of the restaurant. There is also a bar called Michael’s Club that has up to 50 international craft beers, which is one of many places you can relax with a drink. If drinking isn’t your thing, there are also a number of quite places – like The Hideaway, where can get coffee, or the Sky Observation Lounge, an expansive room with epic views of the sea – where you can, say, read a book or listen to music. So, there is a place for the booze hound and the bookworm.

It is worth mentioning that the two other new ships listed above that were highly rated – Allure of the Seas and Oasis of the Seas – are also the world’s largest cruise ships. So, these two ships, both of the Royal Caribbean International fleet, are not only enormous, but also well-regarded by the passengers who have sailed with them.

Celebrity Silhouette, Allure of the Seas, and Oasis of the Seas are all amazing new ships that people have so far enjoyed, so they are certainly worth considering if you are looking to book a cruise vacation.

First, a brief recounting of the Costa Concordia accident is in order. On the night of January 13th, a Friday, the massive Costa Concordia, holding 3,200 passengers and 1,000 crew members, crashed off Isola del Giglio, Italy. The ship hit a reef, causing it to keel over and partially sink. As of this writing, 11 people have been confirmed dead and over two dozen are unaccounted for, meaning the death toll will almost certainly rise in the coming days as the ship continues to be frantically searched.

Almost immediately following the disaster, blame was placed squarely at the feet of the captain of the vessel, Francesco Schettino. Prosecutors and the owners of the ship have alleged that Schettino deviated from the course set for the ship, which is plotted in advance. Schettino is expected to be charge with manslaughter and abandoning ship.

The shocking cowardice of the captain came to light a few days after the accident, when a transcript of the exchange between Schettino and the Italian Coast Guard, occurring sometime in the hectic hours after the crash, was published by Italian media.

The Costa Concordia, weighing 114,500 tons, is the largest passenger ship ever wrecked. By way of comparison, the Titanic was only half the size of the Costa Concordia.

As tragic as the accident is, it is important to keep in mind, particularly for those who are currently on cruise ships or know people who are on a cruise vacation, that this is an exceedingly rare occurrence. Thousands of cruises are safely completed each year, and if anything does happen during these voyages, it is almost always something relatively minor, like the theft of a passenger’s valuables. The odds of a cruise ship sinking are extremely small. Cruise ships are subject to rigid regulations, and the seaworthiness of vessels, as well as the safety systems they have in place, is evaluated on a quarterly basis. And even when something does go terribly wrong, passengers and crew members are often able to escape unharmed. For example, a Canadian cruise ship hit submerged ice off Antarctica a few years back, but everyone was able to make it off the ship safely on life boats.

From all that has been learned so far, the Costa Concordia disaster is largely – if not entirely – the captain’s fault. If it weren’t for Schettino’s reckless handling of the vessel (he was reportedly trying to show off the half-billion dollar ship to the residents of Giglio), this tragedy would have never happened. The Costa Concordia disaster is about the careless vanity of a thoughtless man, and it does not speak to the larger issue of cruise ship safety.

Of course, none of this is remotely comforting to the passengers who were on board the Costa Concordia when it wrecked, and the same applies to their suffering families. Nevertheless, we must always strive to view a disaster rationally, even if we must do so through tear-filled eyes.

Coastguard: Hello.

Captain: Good evening, chief.

Coastguard: Listen, this is De Falco from Livorno. Am I speaking with the captain?

Captain: Good evening, Chief De Falco.

Coastguard: Tell me your name, please.

Captain: I am Captain Schettino, chief.

Coastguard: Schettino?

Captain: Yes.

Coastguard: Listen, Schettino. There are people trapped on board. Now, you go with your lifeboat. Under the bow of the ship, on the right side, there is a ladder. You climb on that ladder and go on board the ship. Go on board the ship and get back to me and tell me how many people are there. Is that clear. I am recording this conversation, Captain Schettino.

(Captain tries to speak but Coastguard can’t hear him clearly.)

Coastguard: Speak up! (Captain tries to speak) Captain, put your hand over the microphone and speak in a louder voice!

Captain: At this moment the ship is listing.

Coastguard: There are people who are coming down the ladder on the bow. Go back in the opposite direction, get back on the ship, and tell me how many people there are and what they have on board. Tell me if there are children, women and what type of help they need. And you tell me the number of each of these categories. Is that clear?

Listen Schettino, perhaps you have saved yourself from the sea but I will make you look very bad. I will make you pay for this. Dammit, go back on board!

Captain: Please …

Coastguard: There is no ‘please’ about it. Get back on board. Assure me you are going back on board!

Captain: I’m in a lifeboat, I am under here. I am not going anywhere. I am here.

Coastguard: What are you doing, Captain?

Captain: I am here to coordinate the rescue…

Coastguard (interrupting): What are you coordinating there! Get on board! Coordinate the rescue from on board! Are you refusing?

Captain: No, I am not refusing.

Coastguard: Are you refusing to go aboard, captain? Tell me the reason why you are not going back on board.

Captain: (inaudible)… there is a another lifeboat…

Coastguard (interrupting, yelling): You get back on board! That is an order! There is nothing else for you to consider. You have sounded the ‘Abandon Ship’. Now I am giving the orders. Get back on board. Is that clear? Don’t you hear me?

Captain: I am going aboard.

Coastguard: Go! Call me immediately when you are on board. My rescue people are in front of the bow.

Captain: Where is your rescue craft?

Coastguard: My rescue craft is at the bow. Go! There are already bodies, Schettino. Go!

Captain: How many bodies are there?

Coastguard: I don’t know! … Christ, you should be the one telling me that!

Captain: Do you realise that it is dark and we can’t see anything?

Coastguard: So, what do you want to do, to go home, Schettino?! It’s dark and you want to go home? Go to the bow of the ship where the ladder is and tell me what needs to be done, how many people there are, and what they need! Now!

Captain: My second in command is here with me.

Coastguard: Then both of you go! Both of you! What is the name of your second in command?

Captain: His name is Dmitri (static)”

Coastguard: What is the rest of his name? (static) You and your second in command get on board now! Is that clear?

Captain: Look, chief, I want to go aboard but the other lifeboat here has stopped and is drifting. I have called …

Coastguard (interrupting): You have been telling me this for an hour! Now, go aboard! Get on board, and tell me immediately how many people there are!

Captain: OK, chief.

Coastguard: Go! Immediately!

Of course, what constitutes the best cruise line depends on what you value in a cruise line. If you are only interested in taking cruises to a particular part of the world – like, say, the Caribbean – then the best cruise line is probably the one that offers the most cruises to the places of the Caribbean you wish to visit. If you are really taken by enormous cruise ships, then you might consider the Royal Caribbean International cruise line the best, as two ships in its fleet, Allure of the Seas and Oasis of the Seas, are the world’s largest cruise ships. But for a more general list of the best cruise lines, one that doesn’t place too much weight on any given characteristic of a cruise line, let’s consider which cruise lines are the top rated. (We used the same metric in our article about the top three cruise ships; it seemed to work in that case, so we have to assume it will work in this case as well.)

There are a number of sources on the Internet that rank the most highly rated cruise lines, so let’s take a look at a list composed by one well-regarded source, Condé Nast Traveler. A recent issue of this magazine listed 13 cruise lines as the top rated, as determined by the readers of this magazine (who, presumably, have sailed with these cruise lines). Although each of these 13 cruise lines is given a numerical score, the magazine does not place them in order from highest to lowest (or vice versa), but rather lists them in alphabetical order. So, allow us to reorganize the list from highest rated to lowest rated, as that seems more helpful for our purposes:

1. Yachts of Seabourn
2. Crystal Cruises
3. Regent Seven Seas Cruises
4. Disney Cruise Line
5. Grand Circle Small Ship Cruises
6. SeaDream Yacht Club
7. Oceania Cruises (tied in rating to SeaDream Yacht Club)
8. Cunard Line
9. Silversea Cruises
10. Oberoi
11. Windstar Cruises
12. Uniworld Boutique River Cruise Collection
13. Abercrombie & Kent

Depending on your knowledge of cruise lines, you might notice that many of these are small, luxury cruise lines. This makes sense, as the more expensive and luxurious cruise lines surely provide excellent service and accommodations. Otherwise, they couldn’t get away with charging more for a cruise vacation than other, more major cruise lines. (Interestingly, though, Disney Cruise Line is rated very highly, and it is definitely not a small cruise line.)

So, if you are looking for a highly rated cruise line to book a cruise through (and you can afford to do so), the list above points you to several excellent possibilities. Again, though, these aren’t necessarily the best cruise lines for everyone, as people want different things from their cruise vacations. We’ll keep posting articles that rank cruise lines by other methods, so stay on the look out for those.

The first major benefit of working on a cruise ship is that it allows you to travel the world without spending any of your money. Your place of employment is constantly sailing from port to port, allowing employees to experience all sorts of foreign lands as they work. Moreover, cruises cover a lot of area quickly, so in a week’s time you might be able to set foot in multiple foreign countries. Even the most frantic traveler will have trouble matching this rate of exploration. A typical contract for a cruise job might require about four to six months of service, and during this time you could see more than a lot of people see in their lifetimes. To be sure, you’ll be working as you move from one area of the globe to another, but you should at least have a little bit of free time to appreciate the far-flung places to which your cruise line has taken you.

As we mentioned above, you’ll get to travel without spending any money, and this hints at another major benefit to working on a cruise: you basically don’t need to spend any of your earnings during your contracted period of employment. Room and board are provided to employees, and you’ll spend so much time working while on board that you won’t have much time to spend your salary. You also won’t have to pay for medical expenses, as cruise lines are required to provide their employees with health insurance. So, when you finish your contract, you should have plenty of money saved. Essentially, in working on a cruise ship, you’ll in a very real sense get paid to see the world.

A lot of people don’t realize just how multicultural the staffs of cruise lines are. Employees are hired from a broad range of cultures and countries, so you’re guaranteed to meet people of many different backgrounds if you work on a cruise line, and this strikes us as a great benefit. You can never fully appreciate your own culture and heritage without contrasting it against the cultures and heritages of others, and nor will you ever appreciate the diversity of the human species without meeting people very unlike yourself. People travel to great lengths and pay huge amounts of money to have these culturally enriching experiences, but if you work on a cruise ship, you’ll be to achieve this in the course of your work. You might even learn helpful skills for future employment, like the ability to communicate in another language, by working for a cruise ship.

Finally, there are a number of added bonuses to working on cruise ships that aren’t covered by the main categories listed above. For example, you could get your family and friends cruise vacations for reduced prices, and you might also get plenty of discounts for yourself, like at the stores on a cruise ship.

While the work can be challenging, there are tons of benefits to working on a cruise ship. You get to earn money while traveling the world and experiencing different cultures, and this will no doubt seem ideal to a lot of people.

Like a lot of deal aggregation sites, Cruises Only is primarily helpful in that it allows you to search for cruise vacations offered by a number of different cruise lines on one site. There is no need to visit each individual cruise line site, which saves a lot of time. The easiest way to look for cruises is to use the site’s search function, which allows you to specify the criteria that you want your cruise vacation to match. You can choose the length of your cruise, your desired destination, the month in which you want to depart, and so on. If you have a lot of flexibility, you can enter “all” for each individual criterion, allowing you to consider a broad range of cruise options. This is an awesome function, as it allows you to keep certain criterion set (like when you want to leave), but allows you to be flexible in other respects, like which cruise line you want to book your cruise through.

Cruises Only also lists several deals on their homepage, some of which are quite excellent and affordable. For example, at this very moment there is a four-night Caribbean cruise available for only $209 (for an interior room). Such deals are always on the homepage. There is also an entire section of the site dedicated to cruise deals (cheap cruises, last-minute cruises specials, honeymoon cruises, etc.), so you can check this area of the site out as well if you are looking for a discounted cruise or a themed cruise (like a Christmas cruise, for instance).

Apart from aggregating tons of cruise offerings, Cruises Only is also a rich source for cruise information. Most notably, there is “Reviews & Ratings” section that lists both customer and expert ratings (ranging from one to six smiley faces for the former and one to six stars for the latter) of the specific cruise ships of over a dozen cruise lines. There are also lots of reviews submitted by cruise passengers, which list what they did and didn’t like about certain cruise ships. Basically, there is a ton of information about any given cruise ship you might sail on, which will help you choose the appropriate cruise vacation. Moreover, there is an “About Cruising” section that has information about all the different aspects of cruising, which those new to cruise vacations may find particularly helpful.

Overall, Cruises Only is a very helpful site, and you might want to consider using it for your next cruise vacation. Check out their website here:

Cruises Only

Of course, this is a highly subjective judgment, but in the course of writing about cruise ship jobs in some detail, we’ve come across a few that sound particularly cool. Before we discuss these, though, a general point is in order.

What one regards as the best cruise ships jobs will depend on his or her personal feelings about forms of employment. If you are passionate about, say, bar tending, then the best cruise ship job for you may well be fixing drinks for people in one of the many bars or restaurants that large cruise ships have on board. If you are mechanically minded, then a job in the engineering department of a cruise ship might suit you best. This reveals an important principle: cruise ship jobs are nothing more than regular jobs with a twist, namely, you are working on a vessel that is sailing around the world. Thus, the best cruise ship jobs are the types of jobs that would be desirable to have. Period.

With this in mind, some of the best jobs on a cruise ship have to be those related to entertainment, at least in our opinion. Many cruises offer live entertainment to their passengers, and thus cruise lines must hire live entertainers, like actors for plays and musicians for concerts. Or, many cruise ships have clubs on board, giving rise to a need for DJs. These are the types of jobs that people chase after in general, so it stands to reason that some may feel that they are among the best cruise ship jobs.

Cruise lines also entertain their passengers with activities (like rock climbing, ice skating, and so on), and the jobs associated with these activities would be ideal for those who are interested in these pursuits to begin with. The same could be said for the employees charged with organizing sports games and tournaments, which are also very often a part of the cruising experience.

Finally, cruise ships of course have to be able to address the health needs of their passengers, so cruise ships employ medical professionals, like nurses and doctors. These generally aren’t regarded as the most fun jobs in existence, but those who work in medicine are highly respected, and so the positions filled by medical personnel on cruise ships could be said to be among the best cruise ship jobs for those in the medical profession.

Clearly, none of the jobs we listed are necessarily associated with cruising, but of course this doesn’t mean that they are disqualified from being the best cruise ship jobs. A desirable job is a desirable job, on land or at sea.

These types of cruise specials – the ones that are designed to entice customers to book a cruise – almost exclusively take the form of discounted cruises. Ticket prices are slashed and there are an abundance of bargains to be had (although, as we went to great lengths to explain, it is not entirely clear what precisely constitutes a bargain cruise). There can be no doubt cheap cruises can properly be called “cruise specials,” but there is also another type of cruise special out there that isn’t defined simply as a “cheap cruise.” These kinds of cruise specials, which we will explain shortly, are often overlooked by people because of our relentless drive to find the cheapest cruises possible, and while this impulse is entirely understandable, we don’t want to neglect to consider other cruising opportunities because we are exclusively preoccupied with cruise deals.

So, what other kinds of cruise specials are we missing? As is the case with so many other questions, the answer hangs on a matter of semantics, on what we define as “cruise special.” In this particular instance, we would liked to think of a cruise special as essentially a specialty cruise, a cruise that has some features that makes it fall outside the domain of standard cruises. Take, for example, Christmas or New Years Eve cruises, of which there are many, offered by small cruise lines and the world’s biggest cruise lines alike. These cruises will share many features with traditional cruises (obviously – you’re on a cruise ship, after all), but they also have special features, like Christmas trees on deck and strings of lights hung around the ballrooms. On a Christmas cruise, you might also find Santa Claus listening patiently to the Christmas wishes of children. Such cruise likely won’t be discounted, but they are nevertheless different from a normal cruise – they are, you might say, special, and hence they fall under the heading of “cruise specials.”

There are any number of other cruise specials like this. There are cruises for couples and there are cruises for singles. There are cruises for food and wine enthusiasts and cruises for those looking for adventures. The list goes on. Granted, these types of cruises generally don’t come to mind when we think about cruise specials, but they are definitely “cruise specials” in a meaningful sense of the phrase. They have a unique angle that renders them out of the ordinary.

When looking for cruise specials, all people are beholden only to their own wishes. If you are exclusively looking for cheap cruises, more power to you. But we suspect that there are at least a few people out there who are interested in a wider array of cruise specials, and to these people we recommend looking into some of the many themed cruises available.