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 304.

A cruise to the Southern Caribbean offers a getaway to some of the most beautiful islands at all the Caribbean,

and luckily, Royal Caribbean has year-round sailing to these fantastic islands.

On this episode, we talked about a podcast listener who recently took a cruise on Freedom of the Seas and shares his experience heading down south.

Here we go.

One of the things I love to do on this podcast is share others cruise experiences because it allows us all to see how everyone cruises, whether it's a new ship to us or an intriguing itinerary or perhaps just the fun

that ensued on a weekend away.

I love hearing about others' experiences.

And this week, Derek Bergen joins me to talk about his recent Freedom of the Seas cruise

to the Southern Caribbean.

Derek is one of those known him for years but never met the guy friends in the cruise community.

And he's also the author of many fantastic blog posts at touring plans.com. He's an artist and leading advocate of

the Ban Billy Not Kale movement. Derek, welcome to the Royal Korean blog podcast. Howdy.

Glad to have you on here joining us. And we're talking about your recent Freedom of the Seas

cruise to the Southern Caribbean. And, you know, I mentioned this in the intro, but I've

known Derek for many, many years, although I would never be able to pick him out of a crowd.

I actually have no idea what you look like. And also, we've never met before. But we've

known each other through, actually through the Disney community and some common friends. We know

Billy fromcruishabit.com, Scott from the Disneycruisline blog.com.

So it's like, you know, I don't know, we're like second degree friends or something. I'm not

sure how that works, but Derek, glad to have you finally on here. In the wrestling term, we're

...