Royal Caribbean shows off surf park

Unless you despise pleasure cruises on principle, you may be curious about Royal Caribbean’s forthcoming monster ship, the 158,000-ton, 3,600-passenger Freedom of the Seas, which will bellyflop into the ocean in May. Royal Caribbean has cultivated a reputation for sporty cruising for some time, but the Freedom of the Seas raises the stakes with a top-deck attraction called the FlowRider—a 32-by-40-foot pool propped up at a 45-degree angle with a three-inch-thick sheet of water flowing up it at a rate of 30,000 gallons per minute, creating an artificial wave for surfers.