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 377.

When you book a Royal Caribbean cruise and choose the right sailing for you, I doubt most people

actually look into if there's maybe a large group on board their ship.

After all, Royal Caribbean does not advertise this. And in some cases,

there is a group on board, but it's not the end of the world by any means. And this week's

podcast episode is a crew story from our friend Jeff who went on freedom of the season,

which there was a biker group on board, and he still had a great time on board. Here we go.

This week's crew story is taking us to one of my favorite ships, one of the ships I've

been on probably the most of them all, and that is Royal Caribbean's Freedom of the Seas.

And join me on today's crew story Royal Caribbean blog podcast episode is Jeff Price.

Jeff, welcome to the podcast.

Hi, Matt. Nice to be here. Excited for it.

Absolutely. Thanks for joining me here today. So what about your Freedom of the Seas cruise stood out to you? Where are we going? What year is it? Tell us a little bit about backstory here.

Well, we actually started our cruising addiction in 2011. This cruise was actually our second cruise. We started on Monarch of the Seas out of Port Canaveral. We ended up taking a four-day Bahama cruise. We went to Nassau and Cocoa. Just sort of booked it on a whim. It was suggested to us by some friends. They ended up going with us. We knew nothing about cruising at the time, had never done anything like it before.

So we ended up taking our four youngest children, had a great time.

Looking back on it now, we kind of realized we had no idea what we were doing.

There was a science to it, if you will, getting the most out of your cruise vacation.

So the following year, my wife, Tanya, and I, we decided to take another cruise vacation,

this time on the much larger freedom of the seas, larger, at least compared to the monarch.

So it was just a wife and I, we were going this time.

And it was a seven-night Western Caribbean, again, departing from Port Canaveral.

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