Welcome to the Royal Crimean Blog Podcast, your weekly look into the world of Royal Caribbean cruising.

I'm your host, Matt Hodgberg, and this is episode number 462.

We're back from the Mariner of the Seas Royal Caribbean Blog Group Cruise, eight-night sailing,

and today we've got a live episode.

Well, the episode was recorded live while on board the ship, talking all about the fun.

Here we go.

Music while on board the ship. Talking all about the fun, here we go. Our first group cruise of 2022 is in the books, and we have a wonderful sailing on Royal Caribbean's

Mariner of the Seas, a eight-night Eastern Caribbean cruise.

We're recording this episode live on Mariner of the Seas in the conference room here.

And we have a nice audience, which you cannot see because this is a podcast.

But I appreciate all of you that are in the audience joining us here.

It's great to be doing another group cruise. This is our second group cruise since the pandemic.

And if you remember, if you were on that particular cruise, Harmony of the

Seas, over Thanksgiving, or if you listen to the episode about it, you know, there's been some nice

changes between this and a lot of changes, I should say, between that cruise in November, and

here we are in July. And we have another group cruise coming up later in December. It's kind of

interesting the progression of how things are, certainly.

I think we were still, I think mask wearing was still required on that cruise.

And there were still limited capacity on that cruise compared to where we are now.

But, you know, I think for the purposes of this episode, I'm going to treat this like I would have treated a podcast recording in 2019 in

the sense that, you know, there's not a whole lot of differences there. And that's the

important things. So things are changing. And so I guess I first and foremost, I love being back

...