“Thousands of dollars to be trapped at sea on a potentially-stomach-virus-ridden boat filled with obnoxious strangers? No thank y…wait what’s that about open bar and all-you-can-eat buffets? I’m fucking in.”

~Cruise Liner Customers

We all have either been on a cruise ship, or know someone who has. It’s one of those vacations that feels fancy, in terms of cost and luxury, while also feeling kind of middle class, because rich people have their own boats, so it’s the rest of us who have to save up all year for a week of getting shitfaced on the ocean.

The average cruise enthusiast, and yes there are people who only vacation on cruise ships, is like, a mildly overweight but overall healthy middle-aged couple from suburban Texas named Pam and Ron who laugh very loudly at every joke, immediately befriend people waiting in lines with them, and who have a shared Facebook profile.

Like, there is a very specific kind of person who is really into cruises, and we totally support that person, they’re fun to talk to and every year they go on a cruise and make like, 20 lifelong friends, and that’s great. But, if you’re anything like us, you’d assume that the cruise market is like, big but not huge. There can only be so much demand for being crammed in a windowless room on a boat for like, $4,000 a week. Right?

Wrong. The cruise industry is huge. Like, holy shit, 20 million people go on cruises every year. It’s a $38 billion dollar industry that employs over 300,000 Americans. It’s big business, apparently! Enough people have been going on cruises for so long that newcomers to the industry have to find a way to separate themselves from the rest of the pack, and find niche customers outside of the general “we like to go on cruises everywhere” crowd (hi Pam, hi Ron, yes we did see that post of your daughter graduating high school, congratulations). And so theme cruises burst on the scene, and have been growing in popularity exponentially in recent years.

You know what we’re talking about. It’s a cruise to somewhere exotic and warm, but with special events that are related on a basic theme. That theme could be a singles cruise, it could be a Star Trek cruise (also known as a singles cruise), or it might just be a cruise ship where you get to party with Kid Rock.

And while you might have heard about a few of the sillier sounding ones, like the Gronk cruise, you’d be shocked to know the sheer amount of theme cruises available, with all sorts of weird themes. Like, did you know there are an insane amount of scrapbook cruises? One scrapbook themed cruise should be enough to facilitate everyone in the middle of the Venn diagram of “likes cruises” and “is way into scrapbooking” but apparently not. And these aren’t even the most absurd themed cruises out there.  We could show you all sorts of crazy ones.

Oh what’s that? You’d like us to do that? Oh, okay then, sure.

America’s Most Absurd Themed Cruises

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