It must a terrible feeling to sink tens of thousands of dollars into a vacation only to realize after a day or so that you are stuck for the next two weeks and constrained to doing things you don’t especially enjoy with a bunch of people you have nothing in common with. Unfortunately, deciding to go on any type of packaged tour or cruise, where you are too invested (or too far out at sea) to change your mind, can create that kind of situation.
The author was inspired to write the River Cruising series because an earlier decision as to whether to sign up for a river cruise in Russia was very difficult. For two travelers, as much as $40,000 was riding on random snippets of information from Facebook and YouTube, but it was hard to put the whole thing together to get a sense of what the totality of the experience might be like. Fortunately, one couple had published their journal of that same itinerary, and having it all in a book form made it a lot easier to get that overall impression. (Unfortunately, since the invasion of Ukraine, neither the voyage not the book are available anymore).
This series attempts to provide that same type of resource for travelers thinking of taking a river cruise. The early books in the series describe a voyage on the eastern Danube, which at 1,000 miles is one of the longest river tours available.
Volume 1 of the series discusses the initial decision as to whether a river cruise is for you (or you are the right type of person for it). It contains everything we wished we would have known about before the cruise, rather than hoping for the best.
Volume 2 provides a brief history of the region, because it is complex and not easy to pick up in the disjointed snippets of time during shore excursions, and at least for me it is much easier to enjoy such things when you understand where they fit in the overall picture.
This third volume provides a day-by-day account of one voyage to provide you with a sense of the actual experience once on the cruise. This is most like the book we found about the Russia cruise. It’s not a tour guidebook, giving you facts and figures about specific sights you should see. It does not regurgitate materials that are already available on your cruise line’s website. The intent is to move past the short advertising blurbs for various excursions and put you right into the action so that you an envision what two weeks on a river cruise might be like, and what this particular itinerary might offer.
Armed with this information, you should be in position to make the right decision on whether to invest tens of thousands of dollars in a river cruise, or in this specific cruise, is the right choice for you.
The details in the book come from the author’s experience with Viking River Cruises. Other than having been a very satisfied passenger, there is no relationship, financial or otherwise, with that company, and the comments in this book are generally applicable to all river cruise lines hat offer similar itineraries.
Get a PDF copy from the author here, or
Get a copy from Amazon here.