European River Travel, For That Unconventional Holiday
Most people visualize lush tropical forests and sandy beached as the perfect complement to cruises, but have you ever thought about leaving the ocean-going liners behind and opting for more individual, varied and refined experiences among some of the world’s greatest cities, with lots of nature to boot? European river travel is just that.
If you are an old hand cruise patron looking for a new experience, European river travel will present you with a way to stay on the water when the tropical cruise period has ended.
With European river travel, you will avoid the constant hassles of car gridlocks, changing accommodation every other day, and having to take lots of flights. And you will see wonderful places that are inaccessible to a seagoing cruise across Europe’s coasts.
Most European river travel will involve visiting beautiful cities such as Vienna, Regensburg or Strasbourg, but you will also have a chance to sample nature’s delights in beautiful protected parks, and if you like mountains, the Alps and the Carpathians could only be a day trip away from your cruise boat!
There are lots of options for European river travel, both for the busy traveler who just needs a relaxing add-on to an existing trip, and to the leisured voyager who can take off weeks at a time to cruise at a slow pace. While self-catering options with small boats are available most river cruise ships on Europe’s rivers are outright floating hotels.
European river travel is achievable along some of Europe’s oldest and most romantic watercourses. A two week cruise of the Danube River, for instance, will take you from Amsterdam to Budapest, through Holland, Germany, Austria, and Slovakia. You’ll in fact be cruising on three waterways, the Main and Rhine Rivers as well as the Danube.
You’ll visit Vienna, the origin of the waltz, and the thirteenth-century cathedral at Cologne. You’ll visit the overwhelming Danube Gorge and the Stone Bridge at Regensburg, which has been bearing traffic safely over the Danube for more than a thousand years.
One great extra bonus of long European river travel is that as the vessels are smaller then the cruise ships that go out to sea, you will receive a much more personalized and attentive service from the on-board personnel, and you will also get to know your fellow travelers more.
You may be so overcome by the slower, more graceful experience of European river travel, in fact, that you permanently trade in all your tropical apparel for something a bit warmer!
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April 08 2009 04:36 am | Cruises