My wife and I decided to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary by going on our first cruise somewhere in Europe, as we have never been on a cruise or to Europe. We first looked at small cruises in the Mediterranean Sea, something between Spain and Turkey. But after doing a exhaustive searches we did near it down to a couple of the small cruises with no more then 1000 people on a ship. I thought this was still too large for my liking. My wife suggest that we look into River boat cruises in Europe. I thought what a great ideas, not only is the ship is small with small crew and passengers, but at least there was scenery to be looked at as cruise along the river, instead of looking at the open sea.

So, we narrowed down the competition to Avalon, Viking and Uniworld. After spending a long time looking at reviews and comparing cruise lines we picked Uniworld and we decided to do the Castles along the Rhine trip. We booked our trip late February of 2012, through AAA, looking for Category 2 room. But this level had sold out, so we went with a Category 1 room, which was fine with us, we would have the French balcony to be used, as my wife would be able to enjoy her coffee on the balcony.

We flew from Boston to Zurich to Amsterdam via Swiss Air, very nice flight with no problems. We arrived a day early so we could tour the City of Amsterdam. Read more