Let me sum up…

by Jim Bellomo | Dec 28, 2023 | Photography

I am so sorry this has taken me so long. I am back with my final summation of our entire European trip this month. As usual, I will break it down into some categories so it doesn’t look like you have a massive block of text to read all at one time. I welcome any comments about my views, but please realize that they are based on my experience.

We loved Lisbon!

If you read my Lisbon reports, you know that we loved it. It was like the early days of travel for us—just the two of us having a great time in a great city. If there was one thing we didn’t like, it was living out of a suitcase. We loved our tours, the food, the hotel (especially the hotel) and pretty much everything else. It is also a very inexpensive place to visit. Oh, we didn’t have a very good time at our Fado dinner. There must be better places. But that was just a minor annoyance.

Our flights and airport experiences

Again, I have detailed these pretty well in this post in my huge rant about Charles DeGaulle Airport in Paris. All the rest of our flight experiences were excellent. We really liked our flights with Delta much more than we did a year ago when we flew with them home from Barcelona.

Prague—ice and cold

Bathed in snowy white.

After we flew to Prague from Lisbon, we became Viking’s problems as this was part of our pre-cruise extension. Read and see all about it by clicking here. It was an OK extension but we could have done without the ice and snow. I know that Viking can’t do anything about ice and snow, but they can figure out a way for people who are not great walkers when it is dry and warm to see some of the city’s sights. Viking offers an “included excursion” for every day of an extension and for every port on a cruise. But to only have an excursion that on a dry and warm day would be “challenging” leaves out a huge part of their clientele and those that shouldn’t attempt it but do hold back those that can handle it.

But other than my complaint about shore excursions, we loved Prague. It was a great hotel with a great breakfast; we found a super place for dinner, thanks to a friend here in Redmond, and the tours we were able to take were pretty darn good.

Nuremberg—worst hotel, best tour of the entire trip

Nuremberg’s lousy hotel

Viking should immediately stop using Le Méridien Grand Hotel. Yes, it is very well situated, but it is so old and out of date, they need to find something better. Our room was tiny and felt like a cell, not a room. There was one elevator to serve more than 200 rooms. The restaurant was never open to guests for lunch or dinner, so we ended up eating in the bar (where the menu was as small as our room). Their breakfast was good, but that can’t make up for the rooms and the fact that there was no place to eat. If you do any pre-extension with Viking, make sure to pre-book your restaurant reservations for dinner yourself. If you get there and find you can’t get into any place, check with your tour manager (who works for Viking) and see if they can find you somewhere. That worked for us in Budapest.

But in Nuremberg, I went on the best tour of the entire trip. If you go, do the WWII Nuremberg tour. If you can get Werner as your guide, you will have hit the jackpot. His knowledge and understanding of the topic are encyclopedic, and he was great with the delivery—a born storyteller.

The Cruise—from Regensburg to Budapest on Viking Gulveig

Now that’s a long ship. Maybe that’s why Viking calls it a longship.

This was our first river cruise, and I have to say we truly enjoyed it. It is quite different from an ocean cruise, and we are looking forward to our next one on the Douro River in Portugal next October. It will be a really different experience than the ice and frigid cold we experienced on this one.

The cruise (as you may recall) was billed as Christmas on the Danube—Europe’s Christmas Markets. I don’t know what I thought the Christmas Market thing would be, but it wasn’t that. My expectations were that once we were in Europe, we would be Christmased to death. We weren’t. If anything, it was almost the opposite. As much as I loved the ship, it just wasn’t very festive. We saw a lot of other riverboats/ships, and 90% were better decorated for Christmas than ours was. And there was little to no Christmas music on board. The piano player would drop one or two holiday tunes into his nightly repertoire, but that was it.

And the Christmas Markets were pretty much all alike. The ones we saw in Lisbon were our favorites, followed by the ones in Budapest, but otherwise, they were all about the same. The same merchandise, the same foods, the same crowds, the same drinks. It truly was a case of if you have seen one, you have seen them all. And Viking felt we wanted to see them all for three or four hours. I don’t know what I was supposed to do at a Christmas Market for that amount of time.

Getting back to the ship, our stateroom was excellent. We had a typical verandah, which is tiny by ocean ship standards (205 square feet with the verandah), but it was so well-designed that we barely noticed. The bed was much more comfortable than the bed we had on our Viking Ocean cruise in October 2022. We had plenty of storage, and by the time we got to our stateroom (after being in three hotels in the last ten days.

Things we loved about the cruise and the ship

• Embarkation was amazing and easy. We arrived from Nuremberg, got off our “luxury motor coach,” and went right onto the ship. We (about 40 of us coming from the extension) gave them our credit card info and got our room keys in less than 10 minutes. Then, every person was escorted directly to their stateroom by a crew member. We got Natalia from Poland. She later turned out to be one of our servers in the dining room. She was so great, showing us how everything in our stateroom worked and telling us how to get help if we needed it. She stayed and talked for about 15 minutes, asking about us and seeing if there was anything else she could do for us. What a treat! Best embarkation ever.
• The main dining room was surprisingly spacious. But unlike ocean cruises, you better like to meet people because there are NO tables for two. There aren’t even tables for four. There are tables for six, eight or ten people. That’s it. But that worked for us. We were thrilled to have meals with new friends, especially our new friend from New Hampshire, Carol.
• We never had to wait for an elevator. Because we really didn’t have to. There are only three levels on a Viking longship. And the only reason to go below level two is if you have a stateroom on deck one. We were on deck two (stateroom 213), so we never went down to one. The main dining room is on deck two as well, so we could have eaten all our meals and never even gone upstairs if we didn’t want to. But the top deck had the only lounge and a small buffet. We went up for drinks most nights and to hear what Debra, our Program Director, told us what was on tap for the next day.
• Dinner times were interesting. By that, I mean that they were later…or earlier. They changed every day. They were usually close to 7:00 pm but, one night (because of an after-dinner concert in Vienna that many attended), dinner was at 5:30. Other nights, if there was a late shore excursion coming back to the ship, it might be as late as 7:30 (which is really late for us).

Things we would love to see changed

These things are going to be really picky. Why? Because Kathleen and I could only think of some minor annoyances that we didn’t like.

• The pianist in the lounge was too loud! Why do cruise lines, restaurants, and pretty much every public lounge or bar think we want to hear loud music every single second of the day? We met some great people on this cruise—people we would have loved to have traded travel stories with. But most of the time, when we were in the only lounge on the ship, we couldn’t hear people sitting directly across from us talk. The pianist thought that louder was better, and he played one of those electronic pianos that made him the entire band, and he liked to show it off. Not to mention the fact that he barely played any Christmas music. TURN HIM DOWN PLEASE!  During the rest of the day there is excellent recorded music playing in the lounge. At a low volume. Low enough that you can have a conversation. We would have loved to have that in the evenings. If you read my review of our ocean cruise on Oceania’s Vista in October, you know I complained about that on that ship as well. On Viking Ocean ships, there are many places to go and. have a nice, quiet drink with conversation. But river ships only have one lounge, and if Mr. Loud is playing the piano, you are screwed.
• Laundry service was highway robbery. By the time we boarded the ship, we had been on the road for ten days. We needed to send some things out to get clean. We knew there was a chargeable laundry service on the ship, but not one that charged $4 to wash a pair of socks, $7 to wash a pair of jeans or $6 to wash a tee-shirt. We ended up sending out six items, and the bill was $42. That’s HORRIBLE!
• Rafting was fine, except once when it was UNSAFE! If you aren’t familiar with rafting (as it pertains to river ships), it is when two, three, or four of these very long ships tie up to each other. Then, if your ship is the second, third or fourth ship out from the dock, you cross through the lobby area of each of the inside ships to get to yours. It’s not a big deal, and you can look at the other ships a little. But this kind of rafting only happened with other Viking ships. The one time we were rafted with a non-Viking ship, we had returned from Munich, it was very dark and we were not allowed to cross through the other ship’s lobby. We had to climb to the top (observation/sun) deck, cross over and climb down into our ship. This meant climbing some slippery stairs, crossing over an icy deck, then onto a very narrow gangplank between the ships (three stories off the water) across our ship’s icy deck and then back down some more slippery steps. This should not happen.
•  The lunch on embarkation day was just wrong. We left Nuremberg at 11:00 am (too early for lunch). We arrived at the ship at 2:00 pm and were told that there was a buffet lunch in the lounge on deck three. That lunch was really sparse. And really poor. They need to improve this situation. Better scheduling (leaving Nuremberg earlier or later) would help.

As you can see, we are nitpicking here. It was a great cruise with four tiny blips. All of them are easily fixable.

Viking Shore Excursions

I have already mentioned that our pre-cruise tours were outstanding. And our post cruise tours were even better when we got to Budapest. But I want to run through the ports really quickly. You can always go back for a more in-depth look in previous posts.

• All the tours on this cruise were better than any of the tours we took on our Viking Ocean cruise in the Mediterranean back in 2022.
• The worst guide was the guy we had in Regensburg. His job was to show us around the city in about 45 minutes. What he did was get us off the ship on back streets, told misogynistic jokes as we walked, took us to see nothing really interesting and then left us in the middle of town saying, “The river is over that way. Just get there and turn right.” WTF? He should never be used again.
• The second worst was the guide who took us to Munich. He was just okay as a guide, but what he or Viking did to us was not. This was the day that we enjoyed going to the BMW headquarters and then downtown Munich and then a very nice lunch. But after that, we were just told we had three hours of free time and no place to go to get out of the cold. That was WRONG! No one needs to shop for three hours, especially on a Sunday when all the shops in the old town core were closed. The only real option for shopping was the Christmas Market but how many ornaments can you buy or how much mulled wine could you drink (and still find your way back to the bus). This needs to change.
• Some of the excursions were just “fine.” They were nothing to write home about. The tours on the extensions were much better than those on the cruise, except for maybe the “Panoramic Budapest” tour that we took with the hilarious Barbie. The rest were either bad (like the first two above) or just “fine.”
• It would be VERY hard to do private tours. On an ocean ship, we would just have done private tours, but I am just not sure if you could do that on a river cruise. The reason you would have a hard time doing that is that you never know where the ship is going to be. For instance, we went to bed in Regensburg with the knowledge that the next morning, we would still be in the same place. If we had been doing a private tour, we would have told our guide to meet us there and then found out where we could rejoin the ship. But when we got up, we were miles down the river because the ship had to move quickly to get under some low bridges just outside Regensburg. This was NOT Viking’s fault. The river levels cannot be controlled. When we got up that morning, we were going to Munich. The ship just pulled over, tied up in the middle of nowhere, and we got off and met our “luxury motor coach” on a very rural road.
• I make jokes about “luxury motor coaches,” but that really didn’t apply to the buses we rode on during this cruise. They truly were luxury motor coaches: great seats, lots of legroom, places to put anything you carried. We had been dreading the long bus rides from Prague to Nuremberg and from there to Regensburg, but they were very nice. And they planned restroom breaks when needed. I would have no problem taking them again. Much better than on our Viking Ocean cruise in October 22.

The Food

Our last ocean cruise on Oceania’s Vista in October 2023 was all about the food. The rest of the cruise was nice, but I wrote a lot about the food, as I do on many of our cruises. On this cruise, we had very little to complain about food-wise. Our servers were outstanding. Breakfast in the dining room was a buffet, but you can also order from a really nice menu.

We had only one complaint about the food in the entire cruise. Jamie and I ordered fish and chips one day, and we sent it back. The fish had sat too long and had turned to rubber instead of being crisp. That may have been more of a service thing than a cooking thing. We do wish that the chef had some heartier soups. When you come in from a cold excursion and go to have lunch and all the soups are just broth, you kind of wish for a nice clam, corn or potato chowder.

Other than that, the food was great. Lots of variety, lots of interesting dishes. My brother said it passed the “Steve Test.”

Beautiful Budapest

If you have been following along for the last three weeks, then you know we LOVED Budapest: great tours, a very nice hotel with an amazing view, and a super tour coordinator. Only one guide was truly horrid, and we have already forgotten the horrible Lazlo. If you missed my detailed reports on Budapest, they start here.

The Final Word

And that does it. I hope you have enjoyed coming along on this trip. We had a great time; it only felt like we had hit a wall a few times and would do it again (but NOT a Christmas Market cruise). We are going back to do another river cruise in October. But for my faithful readers, stick with us. We are off to England, Scotland and Norway in June for almost a full month. And, of course, a few posts before that.

Don’t fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have.  —Louis E. Boone.