A lot of people think that this is about my cruise pursuits, and it is not.

I mean, many in your audience will forget more about cruising than I'll ever learn.

Welcome back, everybody, the DCL Duo podcast.

And tonight, we're excited to have a special guest on.

The podcast we have here is about Disney Cruise Line, but Sam and I are pretty excited about cruising in general.

And so we thought, who better to bring on to express the joy of cruising than the author of the book titled The Joy of Cruising,

Paul Thornton. Paul, welcome to the show. Thank you. I am glad to be here. Well, really excited to talk to you, Paul, that most of the time we ask our guests sort of what's your Disney background. Now, I know you're living in Florida, so you probably have some exposure to Disney, but do you get to the parks much? Have you sailed on the cruise line at all?

Yeah.

So I've been to, of course, I've been to Disneyland in California a couple of times.

Then the Disney World several times, and I only live three hours away.

So I'm pretty familiar with the Disney Park.

And then I chose Disney Cruise Line as the line to introduce my grandkids

to cruising. We went on on Disney Dream five years ago. No surprise, they got hooked on cruising

and have been my cruise partners on every cruise we've taken since then. Yeah. Well, Disney is a great

way to, I think, introduce young ones to cruising for sure. Well, let's talk a bit about your book, Paul, because that's what we're here to sort of chat through. Sam and I both read the book. I reread it here in advance of recording the podcast because I wanted to refamiliarize myself with some of the stories in it. What was the inspiration for the book? Yeah, I cruise at least once or

twice a year, and I'm one of those people, you know, I have to research to death, anything I'm going to

spend money on. So in the process of doing consumer research for cruises on, you know, on like

the discussion boards, you know, cruise critic and the Facebook cruise groups and all that.

You know, I found myself fascinated by what I was reading on the various cruise forums and

cruise groups, and I became intrigued about the cruise community and came up with the idea

of perhaps sharing what sounded like their very rich stories. So I really started off doing research,

but I ended up doing more of learning about other cruisers than I did about the cruise I was about to

...