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Mark and his family just returned. I say just returned. In October, they took a cruise on the Carnival Ference, Carnival Cruise Lines, one of their newest ships. They got from Costa Cruises based out of Long Beach, California, year-round. It sails down to the Mexican Riviera, and Mark joins us on the line to talk about it. Hey, Mark.

Doug, how's it going?

Good, man.

It's awesome to hear your voice.

It's been a little while before we jump to Carnival Forensi. We'll take a step back as we always do. Give me some pre-cruced thoughts. What made you want to take this carnival ship out of L.A.? primarily was our family, but we also opted to go with our Girl Scout troop,

my daughter's troop. She's turning 18 this year.

Troop's kind of expanding. They've earned some money over the years from cooking sales and all that. And kind of a last hurrah's part of the troop, we decided to get the troop together and go on a seven day on the West Coast. And the forensic worked out perfectly because a couple things. One, it was on the West Coast. We live in Reno,

so nice, you know, easy jaunt down to L.A. Two, Ferrenzy is brand new, right? So it's kind of nice to try out that class of ship. I always like to knock out, you know, additional carnival ships. And kind of the third is that, you know, I turned platinum on our last cruise and now my oldest daughter and my wife, both turned platinum on this crew.

So it's kind of checking a lot of boxes for us.

Yeah, you're in Reno. Is that a

drive or a flight to L.A.? It really depends on the occasion. Sometimes it'll drive it,

depending on what else we've got going on. But this time we end up flying down from here to Long Beach.

Okay. Gotcha. Very nice. So you make your way over to Long Beach. Do you do any pre-crues time there or day of? Yeah, no, we always flying the day before. We love Long Beach. We love the weather, the climate. Always love checking out the Queen Mary, staying right there in the downtown the centric area for the shops. And it's just so much to do.

My daughter loves a couple restaurants there. So we just enjoy the day and take the time to

enjoy the site. It comes to embarkation day. You make your way to the terminal. How was

embarkation? And how long did it take you from the curb to the ship? Kind of a catch that week we

were there. It's actually the Long Beach Marathon that day. So it added a little bit of a lot of the bridges were closed and road closures. So there's a lot of kind of planning you had to do in advance. But we made it work. One of the things we actually do recommended the tip that people have is we actually had our Uber drop was off from, we stayed in Long Beach and just went over the bridge to the pier.

We actually had them drop us off at the Queen Mary terminal, at the actual Queen Mary itself, instead of the cruise terminal.

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