While our wedding was one wonderful day, our honeymoon was an incredible 28 days spent traveling around the world.

We asked ourselves when else we could justify a month off from work, but our families wondered if we'd still be married after four straight weeks together in nine time zones.

From start to finish, we spent 94 hours in the air, flying more than 42,000 miles. While our body clocks never completely adjusted, it was all well worth it. We saw the famed sunset in Key West, sandy black shores around Tahiti, the Opera House and governor's mansion in Sydney, Bangkok's ornate Grand Palace, the Ancient Agora in Athens and Sorrento's Mediterranean Cliffs.

Various airlines have created alliance programs that allow you to stitch together frequent-flyer miles using a different carrier for each leg. If you have accumulated 140,000 miles for coach class or 220,000 miles for business class, you can book a SkyTeam (Delta, Continental, Northwest, Air France and others) ticket with as many as six stops. Other airline alliances, including OneWorld and the Star Alliance, offer similar programs. To buy an around-the-world ticket, expect to spend at least $3,700 for coach and $6,600 for business class on SkyTeam.

We'd saved miles for five years to get business-class tickets. Although we flew a lot, we also looked everywhere else to get more miles: credit cards, coupons, surveys and promotions. With better food, wider seats, amenities like on-demand movies and noise-cancelling headphones, plus free booze, those 94 hours ticked by a lot faster in business class than if we'd been crammed in coach.

When booking, a globe was our guide. We plastered each hemisphere with sticky notes, plopped down on the couch, picked up the phone and asked, "Where can you get us?" In the end it took less than an hour on the phone with just one SkyTeam airline to set up a reservation using all its carriers.

Next we turned to lodging. No matter where you stay, spending a month in hotels isn't cheap. But many hotel chains have programs that give points toward free nights; some give you a free night just for signing up for a credit card affiliated with the chain, while others give a free night for a certain number of paid nights.

We belonged to a Hilton program that made our dream honeymoon come true with few out-of-pocket hotel costs. And even though we weren't paying customers, each hotel seemed eager to help us celebrate. We quickly learned it never hurts to tell the front desk that you're on a honeymoon. In Athens we were upgraded to a spectacular room reserved for officials from the 2004 Olympics. Hilton welcomed us to Sydney with a bottle of fine Australian wine. The Bangkok Conrad gave us complimentary champagne, sweets, a bottomless fruit basket and fresh flowers.