We'd been thinking about a river cruise for some time. We liked the idea of a small intimate ship, and that your room travels with you as you sail on the Danube to visit Budapest, Bratislava, VIenna, Melk, Passau. We booked the Danube Waltz cruise entirely through Viking including air and transfers. The whole trip exceeded our expectations. The A380 from Wash DC to London was an engineering marvel. A Viking host met us at the Budapest airport to take us to the ship. Our ship had to be switched to the Mimir at the last minute due to river water levels elsewhere. The Mimir was fantastic; the crew even better. Comfy, quiet cabin; we never heard a sound from the neighboring cabins. Daily updates were thorough and easy to understand. The tours of each city were great. We had excellent guides (one was a college professor) take us on educational and interesting walks/bus rides. In December each city had Christmas Markets with lots of music, food and shops set up in the town center. A local Christmas choir was brought on board for Christmas eve entertainment to sing local and traditional songs.The day trip to the Melk Abbey was neat, and the trip to Salzburg even better. We added on home visit in Bratislava, and a Mozart concert in Vienna. The food offerings on the ship were outstanding. Regional recipes with local ingredients gave us Hungarian goulash and bavarian pretzels right at our table. The ship program manager and the concierge always had time for individual questions and took the time to ensure we had all the information we wanted. We met some neat people on our cruise. We even teamed up with one single traveler to win a trivia contest one afternoon on the ship. We won a bottle of champagne and they comped our Mozart concert. Wow! This was our first cruise of any kind ever, and the whole trip exceeded our expectations. We added on three days in Prague after the cruise ended which was a fantastic mini extra vacation on its own. We would highly recommend this trip. We are already planning another river cruise maybe to Russia in the future.