T-Minus 6 Days Until Departure

The Viking Star

Well the time for departure for our Viking Star cruise of the Western Mediterranean is approaching. We had such a great experience on the Viking River Cruise from Amsterdam to Budapest that we decided to take the new Viking Star small ocean cruise boat to see how the company does with this type of travel. The Viking Star has the inaugural cruise last year and was voted the best new cruise ship. Here is a review from Cruise Critic .

You can read my river cruise blog here is you want to learn about the Viking River Cruise experience. Remember to go to the oldest posts first and read it backward to get the proper sequence.
Viking River Cruise - Amsterdam to Budapest

This itinerary seems ideal for us as I have never visited any of the places. Since this is probably classified as a "repositioning" trip, my only concerns are the short amount of time in various ports and there seems to be different ports listed on our trip than in the new 2016 Western Mediterranean cruise in their brochure. See the two maps below for the difference. I must say that I would have liked the second itinerary better but since you need to book so far in advance, you really don't have a choice when they change the trip after the fact.

Our planned trip


New advertised trip


Earline has been packing and unpacking and repacking for nearly a month as she watches weather reports on the trip. I just go with the flow. I like that dinner is "casual elegance" and that there are no tuxedo nights. In addition, Viking provides unlimited wine and beer with lunch and dinner and also provides at least one free shore excursion trip at each port. Other cruise lines pad their tab with these extra excursion costs.

Viking arranged our flights and hotels and a nice package with clear directions is mailed to you several weeks before departure. We planned for a pre-trip extension to explore Barcelona and to adjust to the time change before the cruise and we also arranged for three days in Iceland at the end of the cruise. Viking made the arrangements and it included all transportation and 5 star hotels. We were pleased with their arrangements in Amsterdam before the river cruise.

There is not much to do except have rain gear, clothing suitable for the Santa Cruz weather that seems to be very similar, and to arrange a "Park and Fly" so that we don't have to fight rush hour traffic on the morning of departure.

I'll try to post things of interest as we experience them for you vicarious readers. For those who have already been to some of these places, please leave comments that we can consider to make our trip more fruitful.