Welcome to the Royal Crime Blog podcast, a week of look into the world of Royal Caribbean cruising.

I'm your host, Matt Hodgeberg, and this is episode number 426.

I've got on a lot of rural Caribbean cruises, but what is it like to go on a cruise with

unvaccinated kids? That's an area of cruising that I haven't really touched lately.

So this week, we're talking all about that up next.

Over the last few months, I've been on a number of Royal Caribbean cruises,

haven't gone on test cruises and revenue cruises and even new ships, but I've left my kids

at home and they haven't gone with me on these cruises. And the experience is definitely

different if you're cruising with everybody who's fully vaccinated in your party, compared to if you have unvaccinated people on board. And it got me

thinking, gee, what is it like now? Now, to be fair, I did bring my kids on board a cruise back

in June. When Rokebine first restarted cruises in North America with Adventure the Seas, my kids

joined me on a back-to-back cruise on adventure that you've heard about in the podcast before.

And that was a lot of fun.

But that was before the Delta variant and before a lot of other protocol changes went into effect.

So I really was starting to think about, well, how much different is the experience to take kids on a cruise, on vaccinated kids, that is, compared to when you go with just vaccinated adults on board.

And this week I wanted to share my thoughts on this because I think this is something that a lot of families are kind of thinking about now.

And, you know, as I mentioned earlier, the Delta variant kind of struck right as school was restarting.

Certainly here in Florida, School restarts in August,

and we basically had no opportunity to go on more cruises. We did some family stuff over the

summer. As you may recall, I went on a quick three-night cruise on Freedom of the Seas, which was the

first cruise shift to restart from North America. There was maybe a test cruise thrown in there, but

really my kids didn't have the opportunity to go on a cruise yet. So that kind of made

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