I’ve been wanting to try a river cruise for years. The idea of waking up in a different city every day, unpacking once, and letting the scenery float past your window while you have your morning coffee or tea appeals to me. So when the opportunity came to do Viking’s Rhine Getaway (eight days sailing from Amsterdam through Germany, France, and finishing in Basel, Switzerland), we jumped at the opportunity.
The trip was wonderful in many ways, but it was not quite what I expected in a few important ones. The Rhine River was low so we ended up switching boats partway through the cruise. This is my account of both the day-by-day itinerary, what we actually did, and my verdict on whether a Viking river cruise was right for us (and whether it may be right for you).
The Itinerary: Day by Day
In the summer, Viking cruise ships leave every day from both Amsterdam and Basel. We sailed the route “in reverse”, starting in Amsterdam and finishing in Basel. I liked this route because the scenery went from flat to mountainous, and the stops became more and more dramatic and interesting. Viking does a good job of including one walking tour with each stop and taking you somewhere new every day. You can upgrade your excursions to do something different (like bike through the black forest, or take incredible food tours), but you don’t have to. Most stops make it easy for you to leave the boat and wander if you’d like. Here’s where we went and what we did.
Day 1: Amsterdam — Boarding
We got on our cruise ship at around 2:00PM. It was parked by one of the three big docks in Amsterdam. The crew greeted us with enthusiasm and helped us find our way around the ship. Viking provided a buffet lunch until 3:00PM and we sat down at a table and met our first ship friends — another couple from Wisconsin!
At 3:30PM Viking hosted a walking tour. I thought this would be a tour of the ship, but it was a full-fledged walking tour of Amsterdam itself. Since we’d been in Amsterdam for a couple of days, we saw only a few new things, but found it to be informative. At 6:30PM there was a welcome briefing and at 7:00PM we ate dinner. Most dinners on the ship lasted two hours and the food was amazing the whole time. Food was a definitely highlight of the trip. We stayed docked until around 11:00PM. The sun hadn’t yet set, so we got some great views of Amsterdam on our way out of town.
Excursion: Amsterdam Walking Tour — 1.5 hours, included (and kind of a surprise!)
Day 2: The Netherlands — Kinderdijk Windmills
Our first stop was at Kinderdijk, a UNESCO World Heritage Site about an hour from Amsterdam where nineteen historic windmills stand along a network of canals in the Dutch countryside. The place looks exactly like every photo you’ve ever seen of the Netherlands, with windmills as far as the eye can see. They date to the 1740s and were built to pump water from the polders, keeping this low-lying region from flooding. Some are still operational.
We did the basic walking tour here and during the tour you go inside of an old-fashioned windmill to discover how the family there lived. Apparently, the other windmills look just like modern houses on the insides, but this one is kept to its historic standard and is essentially a museum. The sight of all those windmills turning against a wide Dutch sky, reflected in the still canal water, is so beautiful. The 8:30 AM start was early but worth it as the light was good and the crowds were low.
Excursion: Kinderdijk Windmills — 2 hours, included
Day 3: Cologne, Germany — Walking Tour, Beer Tasting & Dinner
Cologne would have been a full day, but we showed up late due to the low river levels. We started with the included walking tour, which was supposed to be at 10:30AM, but didn’t kick off until 1:30PM. Kudos to Viking for still holding those tours, though some tours were cancelled. The walking tour covered the Old Town and the outside of the city’s Gothic cathedral, the Kölner Dom, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that took over 600 years to build and dominates the skyline. The cathedral is enormous and intricate, but we didn’t feel that we had time to go inside.
Our local guide was a delight: funny, knowledgeable, and full of odd historical details that made the tour fascinating. I’ll say this about the local guides throughout the cruise: they were consistently one of the best parts of every stop. We were given a little under an hour to explore on our own, so we headed down to the Chocolate Museum’s gift shop and stocked up for home.
Our Favorite Excursion – The Beer Tour in Cologne
In the evening, we’d booked the optional Cologne Beer Tasting & Dinner excursion, which was a 3.5-hour deep dive into Cologne’s Kölsch beer tradition. Our guide was amazing and took us to four different bars to try four different Kölsch beers. After trying the first one, my husband said, “I don’t normally like Kölsches, but this is really good beer.” It was! We had three glasses of that one because it was so good (and they go down easy)! It turns out, Kölsch is a protected designation, meaning it can only be brewed in Cologne. The highlight of the trip was our third bar: The Whalefish, which dated back to 1626. This tour was a truly delightful way to spend the evening and was one of the highlights of our trip!
Excursions: Cologne Walking Tour (included) + Cologne’s Beer Culture & Dinner (optional, $169/person)
Day 4: Koblenz, Germany — Castles & Switching Boats
On Day 3, we began by packing up all of our stuff. Today was moving day because our original boat, The Viking Mani couldn’t make it any farther down the Rhine River. By 8:00AM, we’d docked near Koblenz and at 8:45AM, we headed to Marksburg Castle for a 3-hour excursion to a castle on the top of a hill. Marksburg is the only medieval castle on the Rhine that was never destroyed, which means it’s intact and not a reconstruction. And it was really cool. We enjoyed the tour through the castle, including the armory and the torture room. But the best part of the castle is that the views from the ramparts on a clear day are extraordinary: castle, river, vineyard-covered hills, the whole classic Rhine Valley picture.
How We Switched Boats
Normally, this is the day we sail through the Middle Rhine Gorge, the UNESCO-designated stretch of river between Koblenz and Bingen that is probably the most scenic part of the entire journey. The Rhine narrows here, the hills rise dramatically on both sides, and castle after castle appears on the ridge lines. But because the river was so low, we never got back on our original ship.
The tour bus dropped us off at another point, where we loaded onto a Scenic Tour boat, then sailed past the castles while having lunch. It could have been amazing, but the Scenic Boat was packed with hundreds of people from two Viking River Cruises. The whole thing was a bit chaotic. Still, I’m glad we got to sail past the castles, it was fun to see them.
After that 3-hour cruise, our crew put us on a bus for another 2-3 hours to get to our next cruise ship. We never made it to Rüdesheim. Thankfully, we didn’t have to move again for the rest of our trip. It was a long day.
Excursion: Medieval Marksburg Castle — 3 hours ($109/person)
Day 5: Speyer, Germany — Walking Tour
The next day, we docked an hour and a half away from Speyer, Germany, our next stop. Speyer is a quiet, lovely small city with a remarkably well-preserved Romanesque imperial cathedral (another UNESCO World Heritage Site) that dates to the 11th century and is one of the oldest and largest Romanesque churches in the world. The walking tour covered the cathedral and the Old Town, which has a charming pedestrian zone and an impressive historical gate at its entrance.
Speyer has a slower, more intimate feel than Cologne or Koblenz but kind of felt like a Disney version of a German city because the part we were in was filled with tourists. What I really appreciated, was that they were having their Bretzel Fest (Pretzel Fest)! Given that one of my goals for the trip was to have a really good pretzel in Germany, I was thrilled. (The best pretzel I actually had was in Strasbourg, France from a random farmer’s market vendor.) I enjoyed this tour because we got ample time to wander on our own over lunchtime, a true luxury after being cooped up on so many buses so far.
Excursion: Speyer Walking Tour — 3 hours, included
Day 6: Strasbourg, France — Flavors of Alsace
Strasbourg was a full-day excursion (seven hours) on the Flavors of Alsace tour, which was one of my top two most memorable excursions of the entire trip. The tour took us through the town of Strasbourg, which sits on the French side of the Rhine and has spent centuries alternating between French and German control, producing a culture and cuisine that is a mixture of the two cultures: not quite French, not quite German, wonderfully both.
We spent the whole day eating our way through the city. Stopping at the most amazing Cathedral with the most amazing astrological clock I’ll probably ever see.
We sampled Alsatian wines, tasted local specialties including tarte flambée and the best macaron I’ve ever had, and got a vivid sense of the region’s distinctive character. The guide was great: passionate about Alsatian culture and food in a way that was infectious. We ate well, learned a lot, and came back to the ship full and happy.
Strasbourg itself is beautiful, easily my favorite city on the cruise, particularly the Petite France neighborhood with its timber-framed houses and canal reflections.
Excursion: Flavors of Alsace — 7 hours ($275/person) — worth every penny
Day 7: Colmar, France & Black Forest Hike
Colmar was supposed to be the cutest little town, but after seeing Strasbourg, we kind of wished we’d just rested on the ship for this excursion. The medieval town center is well-preserved with half-timbered buildings in all colors and window boxes overflowing with geraniums. The excursion walked us through the highlights, but we left early because this guide was not very good and we wanted to shop.
Hiking in the Black Forest
In the afternoon, we had the included Black Forest Tour. Because this was the last day of our trip, my husband was tired, so he skipped this one entirely, eager to avoid another hour and a half bus ride. I, however, wanted to see the Black Forest and I’m so glad I went. The bus ride itself was quite scenic and the stop on this tour, despite being clearly set-up just for the tourists, was a lot of fun. There were a few different things you could do like attend a cuckoo clock demonstration and see a glassblower, but I opted for the short hike into the actual Black Forest.
The hike was amazing, we passed under an ancient aqueduct and then the temperature dropped a few degrees, making this one of the best places to be in Europe in July. We hiked as a group out to a nice waterfall, then a few of us kept hiking, only to find more waterfalls, cute bridges, streams, and moss-covered rocks galore. I absolutely loved it!
We got back and had enough time to try Black Forest Cake (kind of nasty, actually, unless you really like schapps) and climb back on the bus. There was an excursion to ride bikes all day through the Black Forest and I would pick that one next time (though someone on our boat broke their arm on the bikes)!
Excursion: Medieval Village of Colmar — 4 hours ($165/person), Black Forest Tour (included)
Day 8: Basil & Onto Our Post-Excursion
We ended our final day on the boat in Basil, Switzerland. This was the lovely view I had when I woke up.
By this point, I was ready to get off the boat. We had scheduled a four-day post-extension to Switzerland and Northern Italy (which I will talk about next week) and I was ready to get into the mountains!
The Good: What Viking Does Really, Really Well
The food was phenomenal. Every single night. This surprised me more than anything else about the cruise. The dining room on a Viking Longship is excellent, each night they have new, regionally inspired menus, beautifully prepared, with good wine included at lunch and dinner. We looked forward to dinner every day, and it consistently delivered. For a ship this size, the quality is remarkable. And the dinners tended to last around two hours because we really enjoyed chatting with our fellow passengers.
The people we met were fantastic. This is something river cruises do that larger ships and independent travel generally don’t: put you in close, repeated contact with a relatively small group of interesting people. We shared meals with fellow passengers from across the United States, all of them interesting, well-traveled, curious people, and those conversations became a highlight of the trip. By the end of the week, we had real friendships and we felt like we knew almost everyone on the ship. In case you’re wondering if we were too young to be on a Viking Cruise, the answer was…probably. Most people had just retired in their 60’s, but there were some younger people too and I absolutely loved the people we met regardless of age!
The local guides were outstanding. Every stop had a local guide, and almost without exception they were knowledgeable, funny, and enthusiastic about their cities and regions. The Cologne cathedral guide, the Marksburg Castle guide, the Flavors of Alsace guide, all of them made the excursions significantly better than the same territory would have been to explore independently.
The ship itself was comfortable. The staterooms are well-designed and thoughtfully appointed. The ship is quiet and well-maintained. The staff is attentive and warm. Viking’s overall operation is professional and our only complaint about the room was that the bed was really, really hard. We were happy to get away from that bed.
The included excursions are a good value. Some of the best experiences on this trip were included in the base price like Kinderdijk, the Cologne walking tour, and Speyer. When you add up what these would cost independently, the included value is substantial.
The Bad: What We Didn’t Love
The Rhine’s water levels affected the whole trip. This is a known risk with river cruising that nobody talks about enough. When the Rhine runs low, as it did during our trip, the ship can’t dock in certain locations and has to anchor in alternative spots, often industrial ones. We arrived late to multiple stops, which compressed our time on shore. We docked in ugly industrial zones more than once, sometimes right next to another Viking ship. And when you dock next to another ship, your beautiful veranda that you’ve paid extra for is suddenly about five feet from a stranger’s window, which makes it essentially useless for privacy or views. We had looked forward to time on our veranda and didn’t get enough time out there.
There is no fitness facility on a Viking River Cruise Ship. This was extremely frustrating for me. My plan had been to get off the ship in the early mornings and run, but on many days the ship hadn’t docked yet when I wanted to exercise. The walking track on the upper deck is explicitly designated “not for running.” That left me with no real workout option for the first half of the cruise. For someone who exercises daily, this is a real gap and worth knowing before you book.
The excursions felt too guided and not long enough in the places I loved most. This is a personal preference, and I know not everyone feels this way, but I consistently found myself wanting more free time in the places that most captivated me and less time on structured walking tours. We started leaving tours early in order to wander on our own. If you like a high degree of structure and guided explanation, the excursion format will suit you well. If you prefer to discover places at your own pace, you may feel antsy to take off on your own.
Docking logistics are out of your control. Everything that depends on river conditions like docking locations, timing, and duration of stops is subject to change, and there’s nothing Viking can do about it. We understood this intellectually before we went. It still affected the experience.
The Verdict: Would We Do It Again?
Yes, but differently.
The more time we’ve been home, the more we appreciated this trip, especially all of the wonderful, new places we saw.
But next time, we’ll do a Viking Ocean cruise. The ocean ships have a fitness center, a pool, and a spa, which would solve my biggest frustration immediately. They’re larger, which means more amenities and more flexibility in how you spend your time. And while you lose the intimate river experience, you gain a lot in return.
If you’re considering a Viking river cruise, go in with clear eyes about the water level risks and the limited fitness options, and build in some flexibility in your expectations around docking locations and shore time. Go for the food, the people, and the local guides, because those will not disappoint you.
We came home having seen things I’ll never forget. Marksburg Castle in the morning. An amazing astrological clock. Cute French towns. The actual Black Forest. And that, was worth it.
Have you done a Viking river cruise? I’d love to hear your experience, especially if you’ve also done an ocean cruise and can compare the two. Drop your thoughts in the comments.
