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 103.

It doesn't get much better than this week because I'm previewing my upcoming cruise on Royal Caribbean's Freedom of the Seas next week.

Let's discuss why I selected this cruise, my plans for on board and onshore, as well as on what I'm really looking forward to doing on this cruise.

Here we go.

From the very first podcast I recorded, I wanted to make sure this weekly look at Royal Caribbean was about helping you have a better Royal Caribbean cruise experience.

Each week, we share tips, revelations, suggestions, and generally ways to have a better cruise vacation.

And this week, I want to preview my upcoming cruise on Freedom of the Seas.

Now, the reason why I preview these crews and subsequently review them afterwards,

and not just my cruises, my cruises, but also other people that listen to this podcast,

their cruises as well, is because I think we all cruise a little bit differently,

and in our collective experiences, we can all learn something that will help us on all of our

future Royal Caribbean Cruise.

And, of course, it's just plain fun to talk about taking Royal Caribbean Cruise because we all

really, really, really love taking them.

So let's dive right into this and start off with the first question, the question that I

ask almost everybody when they're talking about a cruise that they're about to take, why did I book this cruise? And usually I have a really long

drawn-out answer for this. This one, it's really simple. A very good friend of mine is getting

married and they invited me to go on this cruise. There's family friends that are going on here.

This person happened to pick the cruise on Freedom of the Seas. So go back to about, I think this was about maybe a year and a half or two years ago, whatever

the case may be.

It was a while ago.

...