A few years ago, as an advertising exec at a major corporation, I had lots of means but very little time for travel. Real quality vacations happened only every other year and never lasted longer than 10 days. My second career is teaching school...time is abundant and the wife and I spend wintertime looking for bargains and, typically, two-week sojourns.

We are concentrating this decade on Europe and have taken land tours to Rome, London, and Dublin, but our favorite trip was a river cruise with Viking three years ago from Paris to Normandy. We traveled on the Viking Seine that has since been sold from the fleet. We absolutely loved the convenience of seeing several French towns (like Giverny and Rouen) without having to pack and repack and spend days in busses, planes and hotel check-in queues. We learned to manage our cuisine at the rich buffets and multi-course dinners the way we managed the tours...we skipped desserts and the crowded bus to Versailles and took a private car early in the day. We left Viking's guided tour at Giverny, found a quiet cafe for lunch and hiked two hours back to the ship down a series of shady lanes.

Our next travel target became Russia when Viking came up with an unbeatable fare for their "Waterways of the Czars", St. Petersburg to Moscow cruise (for about 25% of their published, full fare). We booked United miles on Lufthansa from Chicago to St. Petersburg through Frankfurt and grabbed a taxi to the ship. We learned when Viking books your airfare, you often experience more than one stop and very early, or very late, departure times. We returned from Moscow on Singapore Air through Houston on the best coach flight for service, leg room, and amenities, that we've ever experienced. Viking's guidebook tells you to not release your taxi from the airport to the ship until you make eye contact with the ship. This proved to be good advice since our driver almost dropped us a mile from our port. We might still be wandering Petersburg today! Read more