I am delighted to welcome this week on The Joy of Cruising Podcast, Laura Pedlar, creator of Cruise Lifestyle Blog. I got to know Laura a few years ago when I featured Cruise Lifestyle in my second cruising book, Cruising Interrupted amzn.to/3seFU8y, in a section called “Bloggers: Cruise Community Champions.
When I started writing Laura’s story she was coming off a great 2019–a year of firsts. Laura had experienced her first river cruise, which was on AmaWaterways AmaMagna on the Danube; her first time on an inaugural cruise, the launch of Royal Caribbean Spectrum of the Seas with an amazing itinerary leaving from Barcelona, through the Suez Canal, to Dubai; and, she attended her first UK Cruise Lines International Association Conference, an indication that you have arrived as a UK cruise influencer. Perhaps most importantly it was Laura’s first year hosting Cruise Hour, as that is how I met her. Cruise Hour is a weekly online gathering of cruise enthusiasts who discuss fun topics about cruising including cuisine, fun things to do, excursions, destinations, etc. I happened upon Cruise Hour on Twitter and started posting responses to the fun questions posed by Laura, often proudly accompanying my responses with cruise photos, typically of my cruising partner granddaughter. I kind of thought Cruise Hour was a catchy Twitter name—and didn’t realize it referred to an actual hour! I was fairly new to social media, so I didn’t “get” live events early on. Despite being named Cruise Hour, I thought it was just an ongoing thread about various cruise topics. It took me a while to notice that my responses tended to be many hours, even days, after the Cruise Hour discussion ended and the participants had long moved on to other parts of social media, or were asleep—Laura was hosting the discussion group UK, a six-hour time difference from me in Florida! I told Laura that story when I was interviewing her for Cruising Interrupted, and she laughed, assuring me that others would respond even later than I used to. (I think she was trying to make me feel not so “duh.”)
Laura continued that torrid pace of cruise highlights into 2020 with a January two-week Southern Caribbean cruise on P&O Britannia to Barbados, St. Lucia, Antigua, Dominica, Saint Vincent and Bonaire. Then the pandemic happened.
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