My wife and I recently returned from a week-long cruise down the Rhine River from Basel to Amsterdam on AmaWaterways’ AmaDolce. We also took the cruise line’s 4-night pre-cruise extension, consisting of 2 nights in Zurich and 2 nights in Lucerne; and we remained in Amsterdam for 3 additional nights in a hotel we booked on our own. The fortnight in Europe was a truly wonderful experience, but for the purposes of this review, I’ll stick to the 11-night AMA-produced land and cruise components.
For the record, this was our second river cruise in Europe, having sailed on the then new AmaCerto on the Danube in August, 2012. We were so enthralled with that experience – after having taken more than 30 ocean cruises since the mid 1990s, including 5 in Europe -- that it sold us on river cruising (see my comprehensive river of the Danube cruise in the member reviews page of this website).
Although we continue to cruise on the oceans and plan on at least several more such cruises in Europe, these are no substitute for the relatively low key, but highly active and wonderfully intimate vacation experience only a river cruise can provide. Our second river cruise certainly confirmed and reinforced the conclusions drawn during our 2012 Danube cruise; and we are already booked on a Douro River cruise in Spain and Portugal for next fall and hope to cruise the eastern Danube from Budapest to Istanbul sometime in 2017 or 2018.