My wife and I are recently retired, well within the past several years, as are the couple that traveled with us.
Our ship was the Viking Eir, a new ship with this being only her third voyage. One might expect a bug or two to pop up under these circumstances however that was not the case at all.
We flew into Amsterdam to meet the ship for a sail UP the Rhine River to Basel, Switzerland. Our only regrets centered around our time in Amsterdam, there is just too much to see and do and not enough time to do it, UNLESS you arrive a day or two early. I highly recommend that you arrive early, and the same applies to Basel. We arrived there at 2100 hrs and departed for home at 0815 the next morning. There was no time to see Basel.
We really needed more time. We should have taken the early arrival option as we only had about 4 hours before we felt we needed to head back to the ship. This did not allow time to visit the museums, city center or to take a canal cruise.