Prologue

Don and Mary-Theresa Madill had been thinking about a cruise since Don retired in 2013. Finally, for Christmas in 2017, Don gave MT “a cruise of your choice (within reason).” We have some friends who have done several Viking river cruises, and that sounded interesting. We got a Viking brochure in the mail offering 2 for 1 prices including air fare and decided to take advantage of that. The cruise that looked best was the Grand European Tour from Amsterdam to Budapest, which we booked for August 2018.

On 8 August, we received an email from Viking informing us that, due to low water levels on rivers, The Viking Bragi longship on which we were booked would not be able to get to Amsterdam and that we would begin the cruise on the identical ship Viking Skadi; it would be necessary to transfer at some point by bus to the Bragi. For this inconvenience, Viking offered to give us credit on 25 % of what we had paid for this cruise toward a future cruise.

Don took lots of photos on his Nikon digital camera, and MT took some on her iPhone. Her photos from the iPhone are identified by the annotation “MT” at the beginning of the photo caption in this blog.

The following posts are based primarily on Don's notes, occasionally supplemented with MT's notes from our cruise in 2018. When information from other sources is added—for further explanation to readers or to satisfy our own curiosity—that is set off in a text box (as this one).

Most of the photos that accompany this post are from Don’s camera (with a caption indicating the time it was taken); those from MT’s iPhone are indicated by “MT” placed at the beginning of the photo caption. Photos from any other source (such as the public domain Wikimedia Commons), when used for clarification, indicate that source in the caption.