Welcome to the Rural Criving blog podcast.

We can look into the world of Rural Cruising. I'm your host, Matt Hodgeberg, and this is episode number 544. This week,

I'm reviewing my recent cruise on Anthem of the Seas to Europe. Here we go.

So I already turned for my Anthem of the Seas cruise seven nights sailing out of Southampton,

England,

over to France and Spain.

And I got to say that this cruise actually exceeded my expectations in a lot of ways.

You know, when I picked this particular cruise, I was looking at a variety of options out there.

And when I saw the itinerary were ports in northern France and northern Spain,

I knew off the bat this was not a

popular itiner. What I mean by that is if we were to sit here and rank, like everybody say

their favorite European itinerary, whether one they wanted to do or ones they've actually done,

I doubt these really ranked quite that high. Now, that's a big deal at all, but it just kind

was something that I jumped out. I mean, because when people talk about Europe, they usually talk about somewhere in the Mediterranean, maybe the Norwegian

fjords. But certainly northern France and northern Spain wasn't one of them. In fact, when I was

on board the cruise and I was talking to some folks on board and they were asking me, oh, are you

here for a back-to-back or something like that? And I would say, no, I'm just here if it's one sailing. And they thought I was, everyone was always like, you came here for one cruise and it

was this one. They always seemed a little surprised by it, given that it's not the most exotic

ports out there. But for me, I really wanted to do something different. And as I mentioned in

the preview episode, I'm pretty sure, that I wanted

to do something that was completely different from the Caribbean and get out of there. And this just

worked out timing-wise and logistically and whatnot. Flying over to Europe, it was actually

...