Welcome to the Royal Caribbean blog podcast, a weekly look into the world of Royal Caribbean cruising.

I'm your host, Matt Hodgeberg, and this is episode number 11.

On this week's show, we're sharing stories and experiences from our first Royal Caribbean cruise.

It's not just my story.

I'll be sharing stories from our reader's first Royal Caribbean cruise, too, because after all, this podcast is all about our listeners.

We're going to talk about what we liked and what kept us coming back again and again

to Royal Caribbean.

We'll also have more of our listener feedback, including lots of comments on last week's

show all about Royal Caribbean's Unlimited Drink Packages.

Here we go.

Today, most people listening to this podcast have cruised with Royal Caribbean before, and in many

cases have become super fans with many Royal Caribbean cruises under their belt.

But once we were all new to Royal Caribbean, and I find the why and the what of booking a first

Royal Caribbean cruise fascinating, so this week we're going to be sharing what our first Royal Caribbean

experiences were and why we keep coming back.

Now for me, my first Royal Caribbean cruise was on Explorer of the Seas on a 9-9th Eastern Caribbean cruise out of Port Liberty, New Jersey, all the way back in 2006.

Now, this wasn't our first cruise.

We had cruised on Disney Cruise Line earlier, maybe a year or two before that, but wanted to see what else was out there,

and this time we wanted something a little bit more, because Disney Cruise Line didn't offer very

different itineraries. In fact, only had two ships back then, and again, their attenaries were very

much all the same to the Bahamas. We wanted to go elsewhere, and we wanted to go on these

mega cruise ships that we'd heard so much about. So we were drawn to this cruise for two reasons, the ship and the ports.

...