The Grand European River Cruise starts in Budapest and ends in Amsterdam (or vice-versa). In an effort to make the long journey across the pond worth it, we added a pre-extension in Prague and the post-extension, for a few extra days in Amsterdam. We started our 21-day adventure mid June of 2018. This post has random photos, so no captions to tell you where they are. I’m sure they will be used again later, along with others from the same city.

I started this blog several years ago to share my love of travel. I take hundreds of photos while on vacation and why not share those and our plans and let you know how things turned out. For me, the planning tends to be almost as much fun as going on the vacation, so our plans are usually very well thought out, making the most of the time away. Some of you probably don’t need help with the planning part, but I figure it’s good to hear if we had pitfalls and how you can avoid them.

Since several of our friends had tried Viking in the past and raved, we decided to give them a try. They were slightly more pricey than other river cruise lines, but it seemed to even out with the inclusion of one free excursion at every port (more available for added cost), free beer and wine at lunch and dinner, free wifi and a coffee station set up for whenever your heart desires a cappuccino or latte. Add on the superb, friendly service and fabulous food and we had a wonderful trip. Fortunately, the aforementioned pitfalls were limited since we put our trust in Viking and they did not disappoint!

Yes, travel is my favorite obsession, but we tend to do a lot of road trips or shorter flights across the US. Since we aren’t avid cruisers, if we decide to go on a cruise, it’s usually somewhere awesome. Unlike our previous ocean cruises, this time we decided on a river cruise via a longship – to provide smaller surroundings with fewer shipmates, less chaos and less impact on the small towns we descend upon. On a river cruise, the tendency is to moor somewhere close to the city center, with just a short walk or shuttle-ride to where we want to be. There were a couple exceptions to this rule, but with Viking there was always a complementary shuttle to the action. On large cruise ships, most times you are docked in an industrial/shipping area amongst many other cruise ships, and pretty far away from civilization and sometimes there is a cost involved in getting into town.

One morning we awoke in Bamberg, Germany in one of those not-so-convenient parking spots (above). Even the shipyards look amazing in the morning light. This was an exception and most times we had views like the photo below.

With memories of our Med cruise still fresh in our minds, we added on the Air Package with Viking. On our previous cruise we landed in Venice with our bags on a sweltering day, not speaking the language and not in familiar surroundings. We were tired from the long flight and, although it was only 11am, we had been awake for many hours – dragging our bags to a bus, finding the vending machine for a several-day pass for the water taxi, finding the correct water taxi and then on to our hotel.

At the time we booked with Viking, airfare was “free” and with that came airport transfers, hotel transfers and the help of a Viking rep to get us to our excursions, recommend great bars or restaurants or provide walk times between various locations. We arrived at our hotel in Prague much more refreshed (still tired, but less haggard) and were able to actually enjoy the rest of our first day of vacation. Don’t get me wrong, we went to bed way early, but we didn’t feel like we had been hit by a bus! The Viking air package was made more worthwhile with the addition of our extensions (before and after), where transportation from airport to hotel, from hotel to boat and back again would have been stressful and costly. The motor coach ride from Prague to Budapest was six hours!

Like I said previously, one excursion every day was included, but if you know anything about Jim and I you know that we have to see as much as we can while we’re here, so we added on more. That may have been one pitfall, since three weeks is a long vacation to begin with, and walking in the towns we visited was not easy, with cobblestones, many hills and lots of uneven steps, etc. I wouldn’t have changed any of this, but just be aware that it’s exhausting. The itinerary seemed to sense our exhaustion, since there would be a late day or a cruising a scenic river way when we needed a day off. Viking formed a “leisurely group” for a group of older folks, who enjoyed the excursions, but couldn’t handle the steep hills or steps to the churches high up. That way they could still enjoy most of the excursion without a lot of extra steps.

All in all, this was the trip of a lifetime – only rivaled by our Mediterranean Cruise, which sailed in 2013. My husband and I have been trying to put a most-favorite ribbon on one of the two, but they were both number ones in our minds. The Mediterranean cruise was, well, on the Mediterranean – with Dubrovnik, the Vatican (and Sistine Chapel), Rome, the Leaning Tower, La Sagrada Familia and Venice for heaven’s sake. It’s hard to argue that the cities we visited on that cruise were historical, beautiful, romantic and awesome!

But this trip was for sure a GRAND European cruise, and Viking made it so. They treated us so well for the entire trip, taking care of all of our needs – sometimes before we even knew we needed them – providing top notch service with fantastic itineraries, great food, friendly and cheerful service and very interesting and enjoyable excursions.

Below is a list of our ports-of-call. Just a heads’ up: I always take an absurd amount of photos, so some may go into more than one blog. Plus it’s been some time since my last blog and I’m pretty jacked to get this started!

Ports-of-call:
Prague extension, Czech Republic
Budapest, Hungary
Vienna and Melk, Austria
Passau, Regensburg, Nuremberg, Bamberg, Wurzburg, Wertheim, Koblenz, Cologne, Germany
Kinderdijk and Amsterdam, Netherlands

Over the course of the blogs about this trip I’ll show you the best of the photos that I took along the way, including a church decorated with human bones and a solemn promise to humanity. I’ll talk about the locks we traveled through, the ABCs of any European vacation, why some cities in Germany are “bergs” while others are “burgs”, some history of each area, some background about the buildings we saw and some nasty nazi stuff and probably more. I will end each blog with a link to the next post, so you can continue in the order of our river boat. If there’s no link, then there’s probably no blog yet – so be patient! I have hundreds of photos to sort through!

First up: Walk About in Prague, Czech Republic
I can’t wait to get started!

Happy trails,
Barb