Welcome to the Royal Caribbean Blog Podcast.

We can look into the world of Royal Caribbean Cruising.

I'm your house Matt Hodgeberg, and this is episode number 543.

This week, I'm headed for my next cruise, and this time I'm going across the ocean to Europe for a cruise on Royal Caribbean's Anthem of the Seas.

And I wanted to preview everything I've got planned and how I'm going to get there.

Here we go.

I take a lot of rural Caribbean cruises throughout the year. Try about one a calendar month.

And as I was planning my 2024 cruises, I realized I was doing a lot of the Caribbean. I mean,

I don't have a problem with that. I think there's enough variation and things happening within real Caribbean that doing Caribbean cruises is not a problem.

I'm totally okay with that. But I was looking at my calendar for the latter half of the year of

2024, and I saw there was just a bunch of three-night cruises coming up. I had a three-night

cruise on celebrity and another three-night cruise on celebrity and then two three-night cruises on Utopia of the Seas in October and I'm just

thinking myself, you know, and this is after by the way, I just did a bunch of cruises on Utopia

for her inaugural, right? And those were three and four-nighters. So it really got me thinking,

you know, in the name of research, I should try changing this up a little bit. So how could I really do something a little bit different? And I came up with the idea of maybe going over to Europe. I'd done my first European cruise last year on Anthem of the Seas. And the more I thought about it, the more I had this itch to go back. Now certainly Europe has a lot going on. And I've only done one European cruise ever.

And that was on Anthem last year out of Southampton, England. And so I could have gone to a number

of different places. But for a variety of reasons, I chose this cruise on Anthem of the Seas,

which departs Southampton on August 25th. It's a seven-night cruise. And unlike the cruises took last time, which was Norwegian Fjords, this one is going

to ports in Spain and France. And I have a special place in my heart for France. I've never actually

been, but I really want to go. I have spent many years learning French back in middle school,

high school, college, and even as an adult, I took some classes to try to help with that. I really enjoyed it. I think it's a lot of fun to learn another language and I kind of leaned into French a lot. Anyway, that was like

an impetus in and of itself. Number two, and admittedly, this is a big reason why I chose to

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