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 387.

They say good things come to those who wait, and this week's cruise story is about how

Brian had to endure a lot of issues leading up to his freedom of the sea crews.

Don't worry, it has a happy ending to this story.

Here we go.

To round out 2020, I thought it would be appropriate to have one more crew story to share with all of you.

And today, we've got Brian Grantham joining us on the podcast to talk about his cruise on Freedom of the Seas, also, which took place in December, not this year, but obviously a different year.

Brian, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you, Matt this year, but obviously a different year. Brian,

welcome back to the podcast.

Thank you, Matt. It's good to be back on.

Absolutely. We talked with Brian about his cruise to Cuba in which he hit three ports in one.

Check out that episode, kind of a fun look at more than just Havana. That would have been a good podcast.

Darn it, why did I think of that?

Anyway, we're here to talk about Freedom of the Seas, December 2017.

So let's get some backstory here, Brian.

Where does this cruise begin before it begins?

So the cruise was leaving out of Lauderdale, and it was a Southern Caribbean cruise eight nights.

Originally, we were scheduled to go to San Juan, Puerto Rico, St. Martin, Labadee, and St. Kitts.

But if you can recall back to disasters long ago, I think 2017 was Hurricane Maria.

And so I think we were on one of the first cruises that actually got to go back to San Juan,

but St. Martin wasn't opened back up yet. So we actually, instead of St. Martin, went to Antigua. And so we booked it because we liked the Southern Caribbean. We like, we booked it

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