Like Europe Used to Be—Salamanca, Spain!

by | Oct 23, 2024 | Uncategorized

Kathleen and I started coming to Europe in 2002 when we went to Italy for the first time. Since then, we have been back at least 20 times. We genuinely love this continent. But I am sure you have seen the protests due to over-tourism. That’s a problem many tourist destination cities are having, with too many people showing up and using up all the local resources and overcrowding cities, especially cruise ports. But our visit to Salamanca, Spain, was like going back in time—a European city before tourism discovered it. Don’t get me wrong, there were still souvenir shops and tourist cafes, but it just reminded us of the first time we were in places like Venice, Florence, Barcelona or Palermo.

Our day (like most days when you cruise the Douro River) started with a long ride on a “luxury motor coach” from our mooring spot on the river up the canyons and then a long drive on the plateau above the river. This one was our longest ride but with the biggest reward. It was also (at nine hours) the longest we would be away from the Torgil. Again, I can’t stress enough how great the “luxury motor coaches” Viking uses here on the Douro are. They are truly luxurious. It helps so much to face a 3+ hour drive (round trip) on a bus when it has so much legroom, decent WiFi and an excellent guide who tells you what you want to know and lets you look out the window (on the way there) or sleep (on the way back).

After a “comfort stop” about halfway there, we arrived in Salamanca around 10:00 a.m. with no expectations. Our first stop was the local Mercado (market). It’s not a big market—about one-tenth the size of La Bocadilla in Barcelona or about one-quarter the size of Pike Place Market in Seattle. Viking had arranged a cheese, sausage and wine tasting. And as our guide, Marianna, said, “It’s 5:00 p.m. somewhere.” The tiny bites (billed as tapas—which they weren’t) were just right for that time of the day. I skipped the wine. It has become my experience that if they give you red wine in the morning at a stand-up spot in a market, it’s not going to be the best wine ever. Here are some shots I took in the market and on the river that morning. No reminder is needed for my regular readers.

After the “tapas,” we were broken up into smaller groups, and each group got a local guide who let us explore the city further. We got fortunate with our guide, Maria Carmen (she said to call her Mamen). She was one of the best we had on the whole cruise. She knew her city and had a wonderful sense of humor. Sadly, she was not with us all day, but just enough that we truly got the flavor of her city. Her part of the tour started in the Plaza Mayor (I think every Spanish city has one of these) and took us through the University to the old and new cathedrals. They were genuinely unusual cathedrals as they were attached to each other, and you could move freely between them. Mamen got us right up to the steps of the new cathedral before she let us go off on our own—one note here about how great Viking was on this tour. Once we were no longer touring with Mamen, they had made arrangements in advance that if we just showed our Viking lanyard (attached to our Quiet Vox listening devices—see the one on Mamen’s neck above), we could get into many attractions and Viking paid the entrance fee. That’s classy. I think the best way for me to show you what we saw later in the tour is to post the photos with some short and sweet captions. Don’t forget; if you click the first shot, you can scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping. And PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

Now that Mamen had let us go, I decided to tour the cathedral quickly before heading back to Plaza Mayor, where Kathleen awaited. I am truly glad I did. I don’t usually take a lot of photos of the insides of churches. I leave that to my buddy Mike. In fact, Bob (my best Canadian friend) and I like to make fun of Mike for all the cathedral photos he takes. Don’t believe me? Wait until Mike posts his review of this trip, and I will link it so you can see 10x the photos I took in this church…and all the other churches in the world ?.

But this cathedral was so beautiful, I just kept taking photo after photo. See for yourself. Pretend the usual warning about phones is here, OK?

One last thing before we leave Salamanca. While waiting with Kathleen, I took did street photography and want to share them. It’s the best thing a photographer can do to capture the heart of a city.

After our excursion, I met Kathleen, and we grabbed a snack (a pizza and two glasses of wine for less than 12 euros—what a deal), met the rest of the gang, had a gelato (so we could have a place to sit), met up with the big group and then went to an old casino (now used as a convention/banquet space) where Viking had snacks for us. We skipped them (pretty dry sandwiches), but we were returning to the ship in less than 20 minutes, which was GREAT! We had a fantastic time in Salamanca, which to me is what Europe used to be like. Sadly, I am sure if I came back in five years, it would be overrun as well.

Overtourism is like planning a dinner party for 12 and 12,000 showing up.   —Elizabeth Becker, noted tourism expert

Pissed off in Portugal

by | Oct 16, 2024 | Uncategorized

So we just arrived in Portugal, one of my new favorite countries, but I am not ticked off at the entire country, just their bleeping national airline, TAP-Air Portugal. Why am I so ticked off? Because, as I mentioned in a previous post, I have requested wheelchair assistance for Kathleen on all our flights. Today, we were with TAP, and as soon as we checked in at the Madrid airport, they sent us to a little room where a woman rudely waved at us for about five minutes before acknowledging that we were even standing there. Then she told Kathleen that we would have to wait 20-30 minutes until someone with a wheelchair could come and take her to the gate. She had to sit in a very crowded and tiny waiting area until someone came to take her to the plane. It got so bad that she texted me (there was not enough room for me to sit there with her, but I was nearby but out of sight just outside the room where she was) that maybe she should walk. And it didn’t help that the other four in our party were texting how much they were enjoying the Priority Pass Lounge and its many amenities.

After about half an hour, we finally got someone to take us to the gate. Thank god she had not elected to walk, as it was pretty far out in the terminal and would have just killed her knee. The gentleman who took her out there got us to the gate and left us about a 90-minute wait because our plane was delayed.

But this wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was when we landed in Lisbon. They met us on the jetway just outside the door to the plane. Four people needed wheelchair assistance, including their respective spouses and partners. When all four were off the plane, we were led down the jetway to a (are you ready for this?) freakin’ staircase. They took people who needed wheelchairs down a set of stairs. It was a pretty long set of stairs. Are these people idiots? All four of the folks made it down, but (from the looks on their faces) it was pretty painful. I know it didn’t help Kathleen’s knee at all. Just the day before in Segovia, she had avoided every stair. Then, I made the arrangements for a wheelchair, and they made her walk down a flight of steps. The two people who accompanied us kept saying, “Sorry…it’s not my fault.” Then who the hell’s fault is it? I will NEVER fly TAP Air again. They are total dumb ass idiots. I can’t wait until we fly home from this airport with British Air and see how they handle it. That should be fun.

Then we get to the hotel (we are staying at the Corinthian in Lisbon—which is not our choice but Vikings) and go up to our room, and the bathroom stinks to high heaven. It’s like the person who cleaned the room took a massive…well, you get the picture. Luckily, when the bellman brought our luggage up, we asked him to smell it and see what he thought. He pretty much turned green and immediately got us a new room. We did appreciate that, but I was already ticked about the flight, so this just pissed me off a little more.

I am also not very thrilled at Viking’s choice of hotels. Not because it is a bad hotel. It’s very lovely. But it is out by the airport and a very long way from downtown, where there are places and things to do. And we are here for two nights before we transfer to Porto via “luxury motor coach” with only a three-hour excursion tomorrow. Other than that, we must take a cab/Uber/Bolt into downtown to do anything. The real problem with that is if Kathleen wants to come along and her knee or neuropathy kicks up, she has to come back out here and can only join us later for dinner if I go out and get her. It’s just not a good situation. Not to mention the noise of jets taking off and landing outside our windows.

Thankfully, when we return from the cruise and stay for four days on our own, we will be at our choice of hotel, The Hotel Portugal. We stayed there last December, and it is right in the heart of the city and in the middle of everything you want to see. It’s not a big chain like this, but an excellent little boutique hotel. Mike found it four years ago when he stayed in Lisbon with his son. I am genuinely looking forward to being back in the center of Lisboa.

So, thanks for sticking with me as I rant. It really helps me calm down because when they asked my bride to walk down those stairs, I wanted to throw the smarmy woman, who kept saying it wasn’t her fault and there was nothing she could do, down them first.

PS: I have written to TAP Air via their website complaint form. I will let you know if I even get a response. Thank god they didn’t ask her to walk UP some stairs.

Get mad, then get over it.  —Colin Powell

A Tale of Six Flyers

by | Oct 12, 2024 | Air travel

This is just a quick note this morning because I have some free time while Kathleen sleeps in. I am writing this in a small sitting area on our floor at the Hotel Preciado in downtown Madrid. Yesterday was an interesting flying day for the six of us, coming from different directions.

First, we are all on a group text we started about three months ago to plan and discuss tours and other stuff. And on flight days, it gets hectic. With Mike and Cathy flying out of Miami and Hurricane Milton hitting to the north of them, our group text got a lot busier, and we talked about flights a lot earlier than usual. Yesterday alone, we sent each other 297 texts between 5:15 AM Pacific time Thursday and 11:52 PM Pacific time Friday. I know. I just counted them.

We spent the first half of the day tracking our flights and planes. We used various websites and apps to see how our flight was doing and where the aircraft that would be flying our flight was at the time. If you have yet to use one of these websites, it’s worth it if you’re worried about missing connections or want to know when you should be able to get going.

Mike and Cathy started the day with their incoming flight being two hours late. On FlightAware, you can see your flight and its predicted departure time, but they also have a feature that you can click that says, “Where is my plane?” That shows you where the plane is that the airline has scheduled you to fly on. In Mike’s case, he tracked the plane and found it was two hours late leaving Lisbon (they were flying on TAP Air). This did not present a real problem for them as they were connecting through Lisbon, and if they missed their connection, they had a plethora (I love using that word) of choices on TAP to make the quick jump to Madrid. The end of their journey to Madrid got them in while we were in London, and Steve and Jamie were in Frankfurt.

Steve and Jamie, coming from LAX on Lufthansa, saw that their flight would be an hour late. This made things a little dicey for them as they were flying LAX to Frankfurt and had only about 90 minutes between their flights. They were flying the furthest as well because they were coming from Southern California, going east of Madrid and then coming back west and south. Things really went south for them when they taxied out for takeoff at LAX and had to return to the gate due to a medical emergency on board. BTW: Did you know that when they remove someone from the plane for medical reasons, they have to search the cargo hold to find their checked luggage and get it off as well? I can’t even imagine crawling into the cargo hold of a 747, trying to find just one or two bags.

I just wanted you to see a shot of our texting. At this point, Mike and Cathy are in Lisbon, and Steve and Jamie just missed their connection in Frankfurt. We were in the air about to land at Heathrow.

When they finally arrived in Frankfurt (I am sure that Steve will comment if I mess any of this up—I am just working off our texts), it looked like they would make it to their connecting flight. They got to the gate of the connecting flight with five minutes to spare, but the plane had already closed the doors, and that was it.

The last we heard from them was that they had just boarded their flight from Frankfurt to Madrid. Mike and Cathy had just finished dinner and were headed to bed in Madrid, and we had just landed in Madrid. It is 7:45 am here in Madrid as I write this, and we are still not 100% sure they made it. But I am pretty sure they did since we would have had a text to the group if they hadn’t.

We were flying from Seattle to Madrid via London Heathrow. Our flight left at the latest. British Air has two flights a day from Seattle to London Heathrow, one in the afternoon around 2:00 and the other leaves at 7:45 in the evening. We last did the late one a while ago, but it worked better this time. But, strangely, you have your entire day before you even think about going to the airport. I got up, had a leisurely breakfast, drove into downtown Redmond for my weekly injection, walked six miles through Marymoor Park, went home, and had lunch with Kathleen. Then she went off to get her haircut, and I cleaned the kitchen and vacuumed the house. We had waited to shower until that afternoon because we knew it would be our last for probably 48 hours or so. We were finally picked up by our Welcome Pickups driver for our trip to SEA at 3:30. I know that’s early, but we like to be at the airport for an international flight at least three hours early. Due to a Seahawks game in Seattle on Thursday night, the traffic was HORRENDOUS, and our usual 45-minute drive to the airport turned into 90 minutes, but we did make it.

I have kept this a secret from our group text, but it must come out eventually. While Mike and Cathy were slightly inconvenienced and Steve and Jamie had massive scheduling problems, we had what might have been our best flying day ever. And a lot of it was in our control.

We (OK, I) had decided that since we were flying at around 8:00 p.m., I would stay on my usual schedule as much as possible. That meant that I would not eat dinner on the plane. You pay for Business Class, so you should at least get to eat the meal.  So we ate dinner in the Business Class lounge at SeaTac. It was snacky-type food, but they had a nice salad bar, some good sandwiches…and cold water. You see, another thing I had decided not to do was drink alcohol on this flight. I have been reading a lot on the best ways to avoid jetlag, and one of the biggies is no booze. We ate dinner at our usual time (around 5:30) and boarded at 7:45. I had a very nice mocktail and told the flight attendant I was skipping dinner to wake me for breakfast, and I got out my Kindle and started reading my current book. Please note that I did not turn on the plane’s entertainment system. I knew that if I did, I would find a movie or TV show I would get hooked on, and that would prevent me from sleeping.

And it worked. I reclined the seat to flat, pulled on a blanket, read my book until I felt tired, pulled on the provided eye mask and went to sleep. The next thing I remember was six or seven hours later when the flight attendant woke me for breakfast. I got to sleep for a good six hours, and that’s about as much as I usually sleep at home. Kathleen didn’t quite do as well, but she did get some sleep.

Another thing that was different on this trip is that due to Kathleen injuring her knee (she is going to physical therapy) and the size of the airports we would be traversing, I asked British for a wheelchair for her. She didn’t need it (and we didn’t use it) at SEA, but it was a godsend once we got to Heathrow. Moving through any airport can be a pain, but it is a total slog at Heathrow. On the plane, we were met by a very lovely young lady who got Kathleen off the plane and up to the gate, where she was transferred to a cart-type conveyance that took her and six other wheelchair flyers to passport control. I got to walk an entirely different route to meet up with her at the other end of the trip through the airport just before we got to passport control. The only hold-up was that we had to stand (Kathleen sat) through the regular security line, but once we were through that, we were dropped off in the Business Class lounge for our terminal. Before he left, our wheelchair attendant wrote down our table number in the lounge so they would send someone with the chair to that table when it was time for our next flight (to Madrid). That lovely person came and got us and took us to the plane, where we were the first people on board.

When we got to Madrid, the experience was truly unusual. As we were about to deplane, the flight attendant motioned us to wait in the first row of seats. A few minutes later, they opened the door on the other side of the plane, and there was a lift truck with ten seats in it pulled up right to the plane. We got on (with another party needing assistance). They lowered us to the ground and drove us about 100 yards to a door where we were met by another man with a wheelchair who took us through a bunch of doors to another place where we could get a different attendant. Then we went through passport control and a short walk again and got into another van. That van took us on a 20-minute ride around the airport, driving all over the runways, behind planes up and down tunnels. If you had asked me to find that route again, I could not have done it in a hundred years.

But the end was great. Our luggage made it, our driver waited, and after a 40-minute drive, we were at our hotel in downtown Madrid.

I took a break there for breakfast, and everyone was there! We all made it. Now for a leisurely day in Madrid. Lunch will be at Boudin, the world’s oldest restaurant. I will let you know how it is tomorrow.

I hate everything about airports, from getting there to taking off.  —Honor Blackman (the woman who played Pussy Galore in Goldfinger)

And away we go!

by | Oct 10, 2024 | Air travel

Kathleen and I are sitting in the British Airways Business Class lounge at Seatac. We just had a nice bite to eat, and we are waiting to board the first flight that will take us to London Heathrow. From there we change planes to fly on to Madrid.

So far, we are the only ones in our group of six who have been on time (we hope to stay that way). My brother Steve and his bride Jamie are coming from Southern California via LAX, and their Lufthansa Frankfurt started an hour late, got halfway to the runway where they were to take off and had a medical emergency and had to turn around and go back to the terminal so they could take the person off. Their plane finally got in the air almost two hours late. We hope they connect in Frankfurt, which was only 90 minutes to start with. Luckily, Lufthansa has three other flights down to Madrid tomorrow, so they should be OK.

Our friends Mike and Cathy live in South Florida, and even though they were south of the hurricane, they were worried that Miami airport might close. The good news is that their nonstop flight to Lisbon and then on to Madrid on TAP Air (the national airline of Portugal) made it out, but they were two hours late. Mike thought they might also miss their connection, but that would be OK as TAP has flights to Madrid about every hour.

So, if everything works out for us, we will be in Madrid at 7:55 tomorrow night (which is 10:55 tomorrow here in Seattle. Wish us luck. We have a three-hour layover at Heathrow, which I consider enough. More on Saturday. And hopefully some photos, but it’s supposed to rain, so we shall see.

Seems like half my anxiety dreams are about airports.  —Lois McMaster Bujold

Our own Amazing Race…30 Days…3 countries…2 very tired people

by | Jul 1, 2024 | Uncategorized

This is the last post of a 30-day trip. It is going to be written over a very long day or two. I am starting this while sitting in the lobby of the Hilton Garden Inn at London Heathrow. It is 6:08 a.m. here in London. We flew in here from Copenhagen on SAS yesterday, and we will fly home at 12:45 p.m., arriving at SeaTac in Seattle at 2:30 p.m. this afternoon. So it is going to be a long day.

The worst part of any vacation for us is flying…and airports—just the total hassle of them. As we have gotten older, it becomes more and more of a hassle every time. I do my best to make it better, and some stupid thing (like yesterday’s screwup on Passport Control in Copenhagen) screws up the entire plan. I will let you know how the whole day went before I finish this post.

Air travel is also strange. It messes with my head. For instance, I sit here now in London at 6:00 am, knowing that before I go to bed tonight, in my own bed, in Redmond, I will have boarded a plane, flown nine hours, gotten off the plane, cleared Passport Control again, been driven home, unpacked, gone shopping for groceries, grabbed takeout Mexican food from Ooba, eaten it and watched a few TV shows we have to catch up on. By the time my head hits the pillow in Redmond, it will be 5:00 a.m. here in London. When is Scotty going to invent the Star Trek Transporter so they can just beam me up and beam me down? That’s what I want.

I should also add that we have those miserable Virgin Atlantic Upper-Class seats to contend with on the way home. No recline unless you flip them into a bed. And while I can usually sleep on the way out from the USA to Europe, going back is much worse as it never gets dark. When we arrive, it will only be a couple of hours before my usual bedtime, but at the same time, the middle of the afternoon and there will be lots of stuff I need to do…one of them is getting back on schedule for PDST.

So, let’s get this review of our Viking Venus cruise on the way. To sum it up in one sentence, although there were tiny things that irked us just a little bit, this may have been the best overall cruise experience we have had (other than Celebrity Flora in the Galapagos—but that’s a yacht, not a cruise ship) so far. And this is our 39th cruise. That says a lot.

What we loved
  1. Our Stateroom. I detailed that with photos on this page you will find by clicking here. Stateroom 5030, our home for the last two weeks, is ideal. Big enough that I am not stubbing my toes to get around the bed, it has plenty of storage, a great verandah and, as far as I am concerned, the perfect spot on the ship. Deck five on a Viking ship means only two flights up (I never take elevators on a cruise except to bring luggage on or off the ship) to the buffet and Explorer’s Lounge (my favorite place on a Viking Ship) and only three flights down to the specialty restaurants, the Living Room and to get off and on the ship in most ports.
  2. The ship. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And to my eye, Viking Ocean ships are just about perfect when it comes to appearance. Nothing ever jars my eye. The color palette for the entire ship just works for me. Some folks say it’s just Viking and IKEA getting together to design a ship. Well, if that is the case, that’s fine with me. But it is a really high-end IKEA. Just think of Scandinavian design. Clean, muted, nothing jarring. No flashy colors. No Las Vegas at all! See photos of what I mean in a previous post by clicking here.
  3. The quiet. Even though there is music in some venues sometimes (I wished the pianist in the Living Room had played a little softer the night we had drinks there), it is a very quiet ship. There is always someplace I can go and sit in silence to write, process photos, read or have a conversation. But the one place that breaks this for me is The Restaurant (a Viking ship’s main dining room), which I find to be VERY loud. Other than that, I love the quiet.
  4. The crew. I mentioned in a previous post. They are the best overall crew we have ever sailed with.
  5. Itinerary. This was a good one. Some of my closest friends would have disliked the temperatures. They prefer warmer weather. We like the cold. That’s why we live in Washington State. It’s cold but not too cold, wet but not too wet (Seattle averages 37 inches of rain a year/Bergen 88 inches of rain a year), and perfect for us. I always prefer cold over hot. You can always put on another sweater or jacket if you get too cold, but once you are naked, you can’t get any cooler without AC ?. I would have picked Norway as the most beautiful place on earth if we hadn’t been to Scotland before the cruise. We loved every port we stopped in (I will forgive Bergen for one teen’s actions), and we have already told others they must do this cruise. Kathleen said to remind you that the weather changes by the minute. We didn’t get snow, but our full day in Bergen is a great example. We went up the funicular in beautiful sunshine, barely a cloud in the sky. An hour after coming down, the rain was also coming down…horizontally. A deluge we had to take shelter from for an hour (with lunch), and then it was back to sunshine.
  6. Embarkation and disembarkation. Smoothest ever! Less than 20 minutes from car to ship on the front end and 10 minutes from ship to car on the back end. It doesn’t get much better than that unless it’s during a pandemic and no one else is getting on or off. OK, river cruises are easier but I am talking ocean here.
  7. Cruise Director Andre Gaffney and his activity staff. He does outstanding port talks—lots of info. And for us, the best part was that his port talks were televised live every afternoon (before a port day), so we could have a cocktail from our included mini-bar while we watched the port talk from our stateroom before dinner. It became our routine. His announcements during the cruise were also excellent. His assistant (I am so sorry that I can’t remember her name) runs the best trivia game at sea. She is excited, in control and asks questions that are just hard enough to challenge you but not too hard so that she stumps everyone. I just wish the trivia had been at a different time. They were either at noon or 8:00 p.m. At noon, I have lunch, and at 8:00 p.m. I am in bed.
  8. Entertainment was perfect for us ?. I put the emoji on there because, for us, on a Viking ship (river or ocean), the entertainment means watching Downton Abbey on our stateroom television. We just don’t do shows anymore. I guess we are old or just jaded—they all seem the same. So after dinner, it was back to the stateroom where I would process photos, Kathleen would read, and we would watch an episode of Downton. Of course, we have already seen the entire series (and both movies) when they first came out, but it’s nice to catch up with old characters we love again. And we only watch it on Viking ships. So, on our 3-week Med cruise in the fall of 2022, we watched seasons one, two and a little of season three. On our December 2023 Christmas Market River cruise, we watched the rest of season three and a little of season four. We finished four, five and the first three episodes of season six on this cruise. Guess what we will watch on our October 2025 Douro River cruise ??
  9. Shore excursions. Every single Viking-included excursion (even the one on Orkney) was better than any of the included excursions on our 2022 Viking Sky Mediterranean cruise. My favorites were our guides in Greenwich, Tromsø and Geiranger. We did feel a little short-changed in Lerwick when our excursion was cut from 2.5 to 1 hour. Not cool. But the rest of them were great. And all the “luxury motor coaches” were pretty nice.

Let’s talk about the food

We ate in the following spaces (in order of the number of times we ate there), and this is what we thought of them:

(Before we start, a word about the Steve Test. My brother Steve created this test about six cruises ago. It works like this: If you eat in a restaurant while traveling, and that restaurant is near you once you get home, would you go there again?) 

  1. The Restaurant/Main Dining Room. We ate there once. For lunch. On a sea day. When the sea was at its worst, rocking and rolling. We figured we should go there then because no one else would be there and because it was close to the water and much less rocking than the buffet on deck seven. We were right about the rocking and the emptiness. We were four of about 30 people there. Still, it was a little louder than the buffet, and the food was basically meh. I had a dry Rueben sandwich that was not on rye bread, had little Russian dressing and came with almost cold fries. The service could have been more consistent as well. See why we don’t eat there? That’s a fail on the Steve test.
  2. The Chef’s Table. This is one of the ship’s specialty restaurants. It features a fixed menu. They rotate three menus throughout the cruise. You can see the menu on the Viking app or on your television and know what menus are coming up. The only problem is that you can’t see them three months before the cruise when making reservations. We had reservations for two nights. When we got on board and looked at the three menus that would rotate through our cruise, we canceled our first reservation. Three people in our party of six could not (allergies) or would not (preference) eat anything in the first three courses. We did keep our second reservation, and when we got there, the menu did not match what was on the app or our TV. Thankfully, the menu had turned to a Mexican meal, and everyone could and would eat all of it except the first course. It was very good and restored my faith in The Chef’s Table. The food was excellent. The molé sauce was a LOT better on Oceania Vista but the rest was great. That’s a pass on the Steve test, but only for this menu.
  3. Manfredis. This is Viking’s Italian specialty restaurant. We ate here twice on our previous 21-night Viking Ocean cruise, and once Kathleen got food poisoning, and the other time was just meh. This time, there was no food poisoning, but it was still meh—just not great Italian food. Maybe I say that because I am half Italian, love to cook Italian food and love a great Italian restaurant. We went to one in Glasgow (Banca di Roma), and on a scale of 1-10, the one in Glasgow was a nine, and Manfredis is barely a three. This does NOT pass the Steve test—FAIL! Come on, Viking, you can do better.
  4. Mamsens. This is a small deli-type place just inside the door of The Explorer’s Lounge. They serve amazing Norwegian waffles with fruit, sour cream and brown cheese for breakfast, which I love. You can also get substantial pastries there. Actual Norwegian bakery goods. YUM! At lunch, they have great open-face sandwiches that I also like a lot. When we were on Viking Sky, there were usually three choices: two meats and one seafood. On Venus, there were just two choices (one less meat), so we ate there less as Kathleen couldn’t eat the seafood choice. But they still pass the Steve test with flying colors. I could eat breakfast there every day.
  5. The Pool Grille. I love this place. It’s out by the pool with delicious hamburgers, hotdogs, a few salads, fries and onion rings. It’s in the open air when the weather is good (it has a roof that opens and closes). I ate a few lunches there and loved the food. It’s a big fat PASS on the Steve test. I would eat here once a week if it were near our house.
  6. The World Cafe/Buffet. As you know, if you have followed along, we ate here for most dinners, about half of our lunches and breakfasts. We thought the food was of high quality and well cooked, and the hot was usually hot, and the cold was usually cold.One of the nicest surprises was the new Asian counter, where you could get some excellent Asian food prepared in front of your eyes. And the two guys that worked that counter were great! What we didn’t like (compared to our Viking Sky cruise in 2022) was that there seemed to be less selection. Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying there weren’t plenty of choices every day. It was always a completely full buffet. But the same food was often repeated over and over again. For instance, on the first night, Steve and I were thrilled to find a massive seafood display with ceviches, seafood salads, salmon, marinated octopus, and so much more. There was also an outstanding selection of sushi on the opposite side from the fish…but it was exactly the same EVERY NIGHT! I mean, in 14 days, how often can you eat the same fish dishes or the same sushi? At lunch, that seafood spot was the salad bar. But at night, that went away. That means if you just wanted a salad for dinner, you better like seafood because that’s all there was.There was too much red meat. I mean a lot of red meat. Beef, venison, veal, lamb…all stuff we love, but too much of it. Kathleen said, “It was like your choices were red meat or seafood. If you want to eat vegetarian for a night, good luck.” There were always steamed veggies but very few vegetarian entrées. We loved the red meat dishes but we are going to have to go full vegan for a few weeks to get over this cruise.Lastly, pizza on Venus was the WORST I HAVE EVER HAD on land or sea. I am a pizza lover. I make the best pizza I know of. Of course, I am a little bit prejudiced. During the entire cruise, they only had three kinds: Margherita, cheese, and one night, they even threw some mushrooms on one. It was just awful.

Overall, the food was as good as any cruise we have ever been on, except last year’s cruise on Oceania Vista. It just needs a little bit of improvement. We ate too much. Here are some food pictures to make you hungry.

What we DID NOT love

Nothing. I can’t find a single thing I really disliked. It was just as we expected, except that the ports were so much better than we thought they would be. As you all know, I was unhappy about the speed of the internet, but that wasn’t Viking’s fault. The problem lies with Elon Musk, Starlink and a lack of satellites at the poles. Get with it, Musk.

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Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.  —Seneca