This week I have been visiting my parents in El Dorado, Arkansas.  It is always great to get back to my roots in my home town in Southern Arkansas – which has about the nicest and friendliest people in the country.

Yesterday I ran out to a local thrift store to look at vintage books and records (I found a 1958 Elvis Presley LP – G.I. Blues – for 75 cents!)  When I was looking through a rack of $2 shirts, I ran across a shirt that made me stop in my tracks: "Cruise Critic Member – www.cruisecritic.com"   There it was, emblazened on a nice blue shirt, hanging on the rack in a store in my land-locked southern town in Arkansas.

Yes, someone in my hometown in El Dorado was not only a member of Cruise Critic, but had thought enough of the on-line cruise community to own a shirt bearing the Cruise Critic name. 

I could not resist and took a photo of the shirt (photo left) with my Blackberry. 

Cruise Critic is the most popular cruise community in the world.  There are some 50,000 reviews of cruises and tens of thousands of community members who rate cruises, comment on which cruises are the best and the worst, and often are the first to report on cruise ship collisions and fires, passenger over boards and shipboard crimes.

In the short one year period my Cruise Law News (CLN) blog has been on-line, I have received more visitors from Cruise Critic members than any other site in the internet.

The Cruise Critic site has an enormous potential to effectuate positive change for cruise passengers and crew members.  The fact that there are good people in my little home town in Arkansas who are Cruise Critic members bears that out.