Kim has retired from teaching this year, after thirty-two years. She wanted a “big” vacation and we settled on Europe pretty quickly. Kim threw out a Viking River Cruise. Hmmmm, I didn’t think that we were that old yet!! I wanted to pick a few cities and plan the trip ourselves and use the “Cruise Ship of the Rails” – the train!!! Europe has a great rail system and it is easy to use!

We are now “Gold Members” of Carnival with Princess and Royal Caribbean cruises. We have some cruise experience and want to see what a European river cruise has to offer. While there were a ton of opinions on river cruising on the web, it made it hard to read through the opinions. There were blogs that made it sound like these cruises were a dream holiday and a bunch of people who grumbled about the age of the passengers. When I was researching this trip, I really didn’t get much information on the excursions or even the docking times. No one gave me the information I wanted to plan excursions. If the included excursion was good, then we would take it. If it wasn’t, then I wanted to plan our own excursion.

In the end, we picked the cruise. We had seen Viking River Cruise ads for years on PBS. We looked at other cruise lines, but decided on Viking after seeing some deals on flights from Viking – FREE!!!! We (I) looked at a hybrid of cruise and independent travel. After looking at some itinerates, we chose the Grand European Tour - Budapest to Amsterdam. The one thing that is a positive is that we do not need to lug bags around and check into a new hotel each night.

Initially, we were going to fly into Budapest and get on the ship. At the end of the cruise, we would have gone directly to the airport in Amsterdam when the ship docked and we would not have seen anything of Amsterdam – besides the view out of the bus window. We decided on doing two days in Amsterdam. The last decision was to add an extra day in the beginning, so we could do more in Budapest.

We used AirBnB again for both Budapest and Amsterdam. In Budapest, we wanted something cheap and central to downtown. For $35 dollars, it fit the bill!!! For Amsterdam, I wanted something different. Of course, I found some cheap housing – but I wanted something different. After a long search, I found a traditional windmill!!! A windmill!!!

All I keep thinking is that we are not that old to give up and take a river cruise!!! Yes, we cruise over Christmas/New Years, but that is to get a Caribbean get-away and dive! There, we are slightly older than the average age. I did a google search on the average age for river cruises and the first one said seventy years old!!!! We are going to feel young on this trip!!! I told Kim that we should go to the local hospital and get lessons on how to use a walker!! She was not amused (I don’t think that she gets my humor!!)!!!!

Well, I was talking to a friend and he asked about the composition (what countries) of the cruise passengers. I did a search and found that the US and Canada make up the majority of Viking cruisers. During the search, there was a negative comment about how many passengers were only one step from the “Old Folks Home!” Hmmmm, have we given up? – are we too old to do adventure travel? – noooooo…, two cruises in a year??!?!?!?

Three days before the trip, I got an email from Viking that the cruise was oversold and they were looking for volunteers to take a later cruise. We are flexible on our travel, so I contacted Viking and let them know that we are interested. We ended up being third in line. The first responder took the deal and we were out of luck! However, the next day we were upgraded to a French-Window room. We are now sleeping above the waterline!! Had we been in our original stateroom, we would have been the first to drown if the ship sank!! Now, we have a few minutes to get out before the ship goes down!!!!!