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This is Cruise Radio.

Hey, how's going? My name is Doug Parker.

Thank you so much for checking out this episode of Cruise Radio.

Very happy to have you here. We're going to drop the show one day early this week just because Christmas right around the corner. Are you ready for it?

I hope you are. Staff writer Richard Sims just returned from a seven-night cruise on Carnival's Mardi Gras. He'll be here in just a couple of seconds to give us his full review of the ship and then some, especially his thoughts about booking the Excel suite.

Let's see, Cruise News today can be found just opposite of this channel, get updated about

the cruise news five days a week, or you can find it on the Cruise Radio YouTube channel.

All right, staff writer Richard Sims, as I just mentioned, returned from a seven-night Eastern Caribbean cruise aboard Carnival's Mardi Gras, and he joins us on the line. Hello, Richard. Hey, thanks for having me. All right, Richard, well, we checked in with you a couple of weeks ago when you were on your aft balcony, living life in San Juan, Puerto Rico on Mardi Gras. You've been back. You've had time to process your sailing. So I want to talk all about it because this was your first cruise in two years. And you normally cruise out of the New York City metro area because you're in New York State. But you decided to come down here to Florida to join us for this one. So let's take a step back. Give me some pre-crues thoughts. In the weeks leading up to it, I have to admit, I went back and forth a lot.

And I talked to you and sought your advice a lot about it because I was nervous, you know,

in this day and age, I was actually more nervous about getting on a plane in the age of COVID

than I was being on a cruise ship, you know, because when I got on the ship, I knew

the ship is sailing with vaccinated people. There are no such requirements at the airport or on a

plane. So I was very nervous about it and having a lot of second thoughts. I think if it had been

any ship other than Mardi Gras, I probably would have canceled or at least strongly considered canceling.

But I've been excited about Mardi Gras ever since they first announced this ship. So it was sort of,

I just had to do it. And you're up in New York State. You had to make your way down to Florida,

to board Mardi Gras. You flew into Orlando that made your way over to Port Canaveral. Any pre-crues time? No. In fact, I really kind of did that thing that we always tell people you shouldn't do, which is I flew in the day of the cruise. I was, you know, which is kind of a stupid thing to do, especially when you're flying out of New York in the dead of winter. I mean, one storm, and I could have missed this cruise. Fortunately, everything went really well. I mean, it was a little bit of a pain in the butt because I now, you know, I used to travel out of New York City because it was right in my backyard, but now it's about, you know, even getting to the airport is a two-hour drive because I live in the middle on nowhere now.

So it was kind of stupid, but I did make everything worked out great. I got to Orlando

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