How to book a cruise to imaginary places….

One question I get asked a lot from more experienced cruisers is how they can make their cruise holiday 'extra special'.
Obviously all cruise holidays are special, especially if it's your first cruise, but once you've sailed the Med a couple of times you can be left with a feeling of.....
'What should I do next?'
It's at this stage that most cruisers start to look further afield, the Caribbean, the Far East, Alaska, Australia etc. But again they're faced with the same problems of once they've done them, where do they go next?

Something I've always enjoyed doing is making up my own 'themed' cruises that lends an extra aspect to your holiday. It's surprisingly easy to do as well.

First of all you need to pick something you're interested in, a hobby, a movie, a book etc.
You then need to plan your cruise around that theme. One of my colleagues is a bit of a wine buff and recently planned his cruise around different vineyards in the Med. He picked a cruise and then sourced all the different vineyards closest to his ports of calls and visited them instead of the shore excursions the cruise line was offering.
Another interesting one is for Lord of the Rings fans. If you didn't already know most of the films were shot in New Zealand so it's not too hard to plan your very own LOTR themed shore excursions to visit different locations where the movies were filmed.
For example;

The scenes in Hobbiton were all filmed in Matamata;
The scene atop Weather Top was filmed in Port Waikato;
Most of the scenes set in Mordor were filmed at the Whakapap ski resort;
Although the scenes in front of the Black Gate were filmed in the Rangipo desert;
All of the Rivendell scenes were shot at Kaitoke National Park;
And all of the scenes that include Isengard were filmed in Harcourt Park;
And the scene were the beacons of Gondor were lit were filmed on Mt. Gun Franz Joseph;

But you can see how easy it is to do. All you need is to pick a few destinations and then try and match it up with a cruise. If you don't feel like doing it yourself feel free to call me with a theme idea and I'll see what I can put together but in the meantime I'd love to hear back from anyone who's ever put together their owned 'theme' cruise and what they thought of it. How hard was it to put together and did it make your cruise more enjoyable?

Happy cruising