This was our first cruise as I have always avoided them before. We never wanted to be one of thousands of guests and eating all you can eat, sub par food is not attractive to us at all. I received an email around 5 or 6 weeks before the crusie date offering specials and after talking to someone from Viking who was very helpful we decided to go and took the Grand European Cruise. It was a great chance to get to see several places that I wanted to go to but couldn't plan how to get there without dedicating more time, effort and expense than I wanted. We travel to Europe often-like at least 2 or 3 times a year for 5 to 10 day trips and when you look at what all you get, it was a real bargain but, not with bargain accommodations.

We are slightly younger than the usual guest at 50 and 40 but, we had a great time. We found everyone to be very active and interesting. Whenever we wanted to move a little faster or go slower, we were able to leave and rejoin our groups as we liked. The concierge was very accommondating and made several extra trips or adventures for us to do. We ended up with a room on the lower level as the rooms on the higher level were already taken. If I had to do it all over again I would still opt for the lower level room to save money.(for more trips) You only truly sleep in the room. If you get a veranda or balcony room you only get to see one side of the river. The beautiful sites are on both sides of the river. Also being on the deck or terrance you get to talk with all of the other guests who are a lot of fun to get to know. The food was great-and this is from someone who is very very picky-the choices were always great and there was always something we really enjoyed. The wine and beer service was ample. Most of the time you are in the cities during non-meal times so if you choose to get a glass of wine or beer you are doing it locally, which is part of the fun. During our trip we ended up buying 4 or 5 drinks on the ship and they were priced very fair so we were happy and didn't feel like "oh-that is how they get ya!"

As I said you are walking around the local area during non meal times, if you need a snack you could grab one while you were walking around. The ship had coffee/tea and cookies to fill in any gaps between meals. The meals were very filling and there were no real times we ever felt hungry in between. The cabins are small but well thought out-once I gave my husband the "we can do this as long as you put your stuff up" speech we were fine. The shower was good enoguht-we never ran out of hot water, there are extra bathrooms available on the 2nd and 3rd floors if you wanted a little space. They gave us extra hangers and I brought a few extra wire ones to save space. The suit cases go easily under your bed and you can store things on the ledge of your window and cover the mess with the curtain-if you have a lower level room. I would really recommend the cruise-it was a great value, We had the two for one deal with free airfare. We upgraded to deal with the airline and use our points to get economy comfort-if left to the viking airfare group it looked like we would have had a couple of stops rather than one and we would have been back in the back, which we do not enjoy. Read more