THERE’s probably nothing too unusual about a bloke deciding that he’s going to celebrate his next big milestone birthday by taking his wife on a world cruise.

After all, with the kids grown up and the nest empty, why sit around watching the grass grow ?

But what is unusual is that the birthday this bloke will be celebrating as the ship he’s chosen cruises up the north coast of NSW on February 23 2009, will be his 90th.

It’s a pretty out-of-the-ordinary idea, but then Ed Halluska and his wife Helen are pretty out-of-the-ordinary people, because this won’t be their first world cruise, their second, their tenth, or even their twentieth.

This will be the 24th time they’ve cruised around the world, and on top of this they’ve notched up close on 320 other point-to-point cruises in the Mediterranean, South Pacific, Caribbean, Northern Europe, through the USA’s New England, and just about everywhere else a cruise ship can go.

In doing so they’ve chalked up a staggering 2,225,000 kilometres at sea in close to 40 years, after getting bitten by the cruise bug in the late 1960s.

The softly-spoken Ed and Helen hail from Pennsylvania, and the only time Ed tends to raise his voice is when he talks about how they “got into cruising.”

It goes back to Ed’s interest in the game of bridge. With this interest and a few cruises they’d enjoyed, he decided to toss-in his engineering job and become a full time bridge instructor on cruise ships.

That was until one day the company that employed him announced “they’d have to let me go,” Ed recalls, the voice deepening in indignation. “They told me I was too old. TOO OLD! What, I wanted them to tell me, was wrong with being 80?

“But they were adamant that 80 was too old, and so Helen and I decided to just keep on cruising and to make it, and bridge, our lives.”

And so they have, and if you press him he’ll also talk about how at one time he was a machinist and toolmaker with America’s Manhattan Project – the building of the atomic bomb.

“I was sent to a top-secret plant at Los Alamos in New Mexico,” he says. “I worked on the actual piston that would detonate the bomb that we nick-named ‘Little Boy,’ and even though we were working with uranium around us our only protective clothing was ordinary overalls, rubber gloves and goggles.

“I was regularly tested for traces of uranium and just before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, tested positive to being just above the permitted level. When I asked the doctor what that meant, he said he really didn’t have a clue, because they weren’t even sure what were the safe limits before radiation poisoning set in.”

Ed was unaffected, but a close workmate died after an accident with a tiny amount of uranium that erupted in a small but blinding flash in the machine room.

Ed and Helen passed through Sydney in March of this year as part of their 22nd world cruise, arriving here on the small British liner Saga Rose which they’d sailed on from Southampton, and switching to sister ship Saga Ruby that was also on a round-world sailing, for her leg back to Southampton.

And will they, we ask, sail the Saga ships, that are dedicated to over-50s holidaymakers, again in 2008 as well as for Ed’s 90th in 2009?

“No, next year we’re booked on the new Queen Victoria’s round-world cruise, so we’ve booked Rose again for my 90th.” Now that’s attitude for you.

And with all this Good Life, how do they keep as trim as they are? “Plenty of walking ashore,” Ed says.

”Otherwise you will pack it on. But then, if you go on Saga Rose as a passenger and don’t come off as cargo, it means you’re really not having fun!”

For information about Saga Rose’s round-world cruises from Southampton in 2008 and 2009 – both of which will visit Sydney and Queensland – call 1800 225 656 for the name of your nearest branch of Cruiseco which sells the ship exclusively in Australia.