Well…it’s Independence Day Weekend and I gotta report to ya a slight change of plans regarding blog posts and images from our Viking River Cruise.

See…I worked my claws off on the trip to write most of the words for each day and stop of the trip leaving me with just waiting on Neil to process the photos and heck, there ain’t really that many of them, less than 500 or so which is way less than the 35,000 from Africa and Costa Rica trips. However…that dadgum slacker ain’t done any yet and I need to post something so I’m going to digress today into some stats and general overview of the cruise.

The cruise itself was scheduled for 15 days and we arrived in Budapest Hungary a couple days early just in case there were airline scheduling issues and to get over the jet lag and we had a nice day and a half on our own in the city before boarding the boat. From there the first stop was in Vienna Austria and I’ll get to all the details of our various stops and excursions in later posts so I’ll just hit the highlights today.

We were originally scheduled to said on the Viking Gymir but the river was closed for a few days earlier in the month by low water between Budapest and Vienna trapping Gymir on the other side and Viking Egdir on our side of the closure. The already in progress cruises ahead of ours just exchanged passengers via bus and then headed back the way they came…so the previous cruise westbound left Budapest and stopped before the closure to move their passengers to Gymir on the other side and Gymir’s passengers transferred to Egdir for the last couple days of their cruise. The ships are identical so the swap was relatively simple.

Viking longships as they’re called were specifically designed for the rivers and locks they need to transit…they’re 443 feet long with a beam of 37.5 feet, a draft of 6.2 feet which can be increased to 6.6 by flooding some ballast tanks and they have a height above the waterline of 20 feet. These dimensions were carefully specified as many of the 67 locks they pass through between Budapest and Amsterdam are only 39.4 feet wide leaving a mere 2 feet of clearance for the very long and narrow ship to transit through the locks. In addition…there are numerous low bridges which means that the wheelhouse located on the sun deck has to be lowered below the height of the deck to get under them and sometimes there is less than a foot of clearance. Passenger load is 190 with a crew of 53. Here’s a shot from the Viking website of Gymir.

As you can imagine…what with narrow clearances for the locks, rocks in the river and currents maneuvering such a long narrow ship is hard. On the picture above the bow is to the right side and on the sun deck you can see the retractable wheelhouse about 1/4 of the way back and then the open air sun deck aft of that (all of the canopies also get lowered for bridge transits. On the next deck down…the forward portion with the black windows is the Aquavit Lounge which extends out onto the open air bow, then the aft third is passenger cabins. The next deck down has the restaurant with the black windows and more cabins aft of that…our cabin was the forward most one on the starboard (right) side and had a small balcony with 2 chairs and a table where we could sit and watch the world go by. The next deck down is mostly under the waterline with each cabin having a small window at the very top of the exterior hull so they get no view. 

The ships are propelled by electrical motors and have diesel generators for powering those. There are 4 propulsion pods about 8 or 10 feet long at the stern that rotate 360 degrees and have a screw on both ends and a 5th pod at the bow…these make turning the ship easy and it can spin in place if needed (and it was several times). 

The service, food, and bar arrangements are pretty spectacular. We paid the extra for the Silver Spirits package so that instead of a single glass of house wine with lunch and dinner and pay as you go for more or better wine or cocktails you get as much of both as you desire including the better than house wine selections. Breakfast was pretty standard but lunches and dinners remained great throughout the trip, each had 3 or 4 always the same selections like chicken, steak, and salmon but there were also appetizers, soups, entrees, and desserts which were local to whatever town or region we happened to be passing through that day. Everything was cooked in way too much butter and between that, the wine, and the ridiculously delicious desserts we both gained 6 pounds or so over the 17 days and are now working to get those back off with our more normal diet. Even skipping the appetizer most of the time and only eating half of the entree course we were overstuffed twice daily.

We had 3 or 4 sailings that were all during daytime so one could see various sights, castles, and whatnot along the river. Our trip was named the Grand European Tour from Budapest to Amsterdam, here is a map of the overall route.

As you can see we started heading upstream on the Danube River then turned north into the Main Danube canal. On the canal we passed highest lock you can reach from the ocean (1,332 feet above sea level at the Hilpoltstein Lock which actually has a lift of 81 feet, one of the highest lock lifts in Germany) and then continued downstream in the anal, then into the Main (pronounced Mine) river thence on downstream on the Rhine river before heading north from Kinderdjik in another canal to Amsterdam where we disembarked.

The remainder of the sailings were mostly overnight so as to meet the cities where we stopped for excursions. 

The only real issue we had was the weather…we expected highs in the 70s based on historical averages but as it turned out Europe was in the middle of a terrible heat wave in June of 2026 so most days the high was in the 90s which made things pretty darned uncomfortable, pretty similar to what we have in Florida at home. However…we just went slowly on our excursions although we did skip a couple, one because Neil wasn’t feeling well and a second because we were exhausted from the days before (I’ll talk about that when we get to Vienna and it was just another cathedral and market anyway.

So…what was our overall impression of the trip and would we do it again?

Connie had a most excellent time since we got to see Vienna and hear Mozart music at a concert in the city where he lived and worked. Neil actually had a pretty good time as well…better than he expected to have…he originally was mostly was doing a trip that she wanted to do and he figured he would have an OK time but a nice vacation…and he was pleasantly surprised by how good of a time he had overall. As to whether we would do another one…well, very likely. He’s not interested in an ocean cruise in the slightest and most of the other European river cruises either have a lot of bus transfers during them or visit ports we already saw on the Grand Tour. However…there are a couple that aren’t duplicative so we’re taking it under advisement for now.

That’s about it for an overview of our trip…so I’m gonna hand the keyboard over to Neil for the rest of the post.

I know Connie doesn’t like politics on the blog so I’m not going to talk about particular issues  but I do have a couple thoughts this Independence Day weekend regarding the political unrest in the US. What I believe is that the political climate is primarily encouraged by the far fringes of both left and right and the media that either supports just one side as well as flaming the other side for their beliefs. Those fringe people do not represent a majority of Americans but they’re the ones that vote in and control the primary elections so that we the voters who are mostly in the center left to center right end up with no viable choice in the election beyond voting for whoever is the least bad. 

As you know there have been a bunch of SOTUS decisions over the past few weeks…and both sides have gotten their share of wins but despite that all I’ve been seeing in the media is how partisan and biased the court ruled and those criticisms have been from both sides. Compromise in today’s politics has become a death knell for your future prospects as an elected official and that is just a darned shame.

I really wish we could get back to the days when the two parties could agree so that each side got some of what they wanted but not all and thus moved the country forwards. And I really wish that media would stop misreporting the facts, chopping up sound bites to get an inflammatory quote and just get back to reporting the facts without editorial comment. People my age remember the days of Walter Cronkite who never, not once, let his personal opinion color what he reported…as his famous last line was “and that’s the way it is”. Years after he retired from CBSd it came out that he was personally wildly progressive in his political views…but he never let that influence his recitation of the facts or the words and phrasing he used. Today…journalists like him are practically extinct and that’s as I said a darned shame.

I’ve promised the bear I’ll try to get to the photos as soon as I can.

Interesting things found on the net.

It’s a simple animal question really:-)

Cyas.