For our first river cruise we chose Ama Waterways, Paris-Normandy 7-night. My wife and I have taken a bunch of ocean cruises (most recently 25 nights back-to-back, Mexican Riviera and Hawaii on Princess) and the attractive river cruise TV advertising finally got to us. The Legro ship, dining and crew is well described by others, so I'll mostly focus on other aspects.

We considered a lot of destination options and finally decided on the Paris-Normandy cruise for a couple reasons. We wanted to do a 7-night for our first river cruise. We're both history buffs and have wanted to visit the Normandy D-Day beaches and American Cemetery, and a previous trip to Paris in the 80's was just way too short. We added four full Paris touring days and a travel day on the front-end of othe cruise. We opted to skip the Ama package and do it outselves.

We flew to Paris non-stop from Detriot, moved quickly through French Customs, retrieved luggage, hit the bathroom and grabbed a cab from the line in less than 30 minutes. E60 cabfare plus a E5 tip, and 45 minutes later we were dropped off at our hotel. The cab driver was not familiar with our hotel, but we had been advised to print and bring Mapquest directions. Good idea. We stayed at the Holiday Inn St. Germain on the reccomendation of a friend and were not disappointed. It was clean, nicely located and we took advantage of a good breakfast package that saved us a lot of time in the mornings. The rooms are small, and our street-facing room had some traffic noise, but it didn't cause a problem. Read more