Trip Albums

The sections below gather together links to our postings about the various trips we’ve taken with Viking River and Ocean Cruises.

Germany, Czech Republic, and Poland – December 2022

We chose to return to river cruising in December 2022 with Viking’s “Christmas Along the Elbe” trip that started with two nights in Berlin (we went in three days early), five nights on the free-flowing Elbe River from Wittenberg, Germany to Dečin in the Czech Republic, and then two nights in Prague, followed by an extension in Krakow (3 nights) and Warsaw (2 nights). Here are the posts so far about this trip:

Iceland – August/September 2021

After more than a year of suspended operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Viking resumed cruising in mid-2021 with a small set of “Welcome Back to the World” ocean cruises in the Caribbean, from Malta, and around Iceland. Antsy to travel again (safely), we booked our first-ever ocean cruise with a trip around Iceland starting in late August 2021. This was a brand new itinerary for Viking. We now see that they’ve made it a regular part of their large and growing set of destinations.

We generally don’t write about our travels in the middle of our trips (as we confessed earlier in our post, We’re NOT Real-Time Bloggers), but we also don’t usually wait for so long (more than nine months!) to begin our recap. Maybe retirement is making us lazy? Anyway, here are the posts related to this cruise:

Spain and Portugal – December 2019

Prior to a cruise on Portugal’s Douro River, we spent nearly a week in Madrid, half on our own and half with Viking with a day trip to Toledo. We then flew to Lisbon, staying there two nights before busing to Porto, stopping in Coimbra on the way.

The cruise on the Douro was supposed to be up the river and back to Porto over the course of a week. However, heavy rain caused flooding that kept all cruise ships from sailing while we were there. After two nights in Porto on the Viking Helgrim, we transferred to the Viking Hemming, which was located (stranded, really) inland next to a dam at Vila Nova de Foz Côa. We were still able to take all the excursions that are usually offered on this cruise at this time of year, though the bus rides were a bit longer than usual for some of the outings.

Here are the blog posts about this trip:

Lyon and Provence – November 2018

We added a lot of time on our own ahead of a cruise on the Rhône from Avignon to Lyon. There’s more information in our posting Trois Bisous. Here are the blog posts about this trip:

Three nights in Paris:
Six nights in Provence, and
A weeklong river cruise on the Rhône with Viking River Cruises.

Romantic Danube – December 2017

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We started our trip a week ahead of the Viking River Romantic Danube cruise with a stay we arranged on our own in Paris, as well as a pre-cruise extension in Prague offered by Viking. Here are all our blog posts from this trip:

Rhine Getaway – November/December 2016

We went on the Rhine Getaway cruise from Amsterdam to Basel, Switzerland during the Christmas Market season in 2016. This trip took place before we started this blog, but we have published some posts highlighting the experience:

Heart of Germany – December 2015

This was the trip that made us fall in love with Christmas market cruises, even though it meant vacationing in the winter, which we’ve now adopted as our default travel season. In 2015 this Viking River Cruise itinerary on the Main River went from Nuremberg to Frankfurt. In 2017 it went from Nuremberg to Cologne, but Viking doesn’t seem to be offering it right now, except as part of the longer, two-week Grand European Tour. We are slowly adding entries for this trip:

Paris to Normandy

We’ve gone on this cruise twice! The first time was in April 2012 on the Viking Pride, one of Viking’s pre-longship vessels. We did the cruise again in May/June 2015 so that we could bring Tracey’s mother and sister along to visit the American Cemetery in Normandy, where her mother’s uncle is buried.

No longer sailed by Viking, the Pride only held 150 passengers, compared to the newer longships that hold 190. It is also shorter than the longships – 374 feet vs. 443 feet. As a result, the Pride could dock right in Paris on the Seine right next to Parc Citroën, which is not that far from the Eiffel Tower. The Viking longships are too big to turn around safely in the Seine at Paris, so they now dock out in Le Pecq, which is just downhill from St. Germain en Laye, site of a 12th century Chateau with a garden with views of Paris in the distance, and a terrace that runs for well over a mile and I seem to remember being used as a filming location in movies (Marie Antoinette?). In 2020, new, slightly-shorter Seine class of longships will return Viking to the heart of Paris.

We’ll fill in more about the destinations on this cruise over time. Here is what we’ve posted so far: