Great cruise, but do not cruise in winter.

It fit our schedule, and started in Rome, important to us, and included Malta and Barcelona at the finish, also something we wanted to spend more time in. The downside, bad weather, common at this time, which prevented us leaving dock in Rome for 8 hours, cutting our shore visit in Malta short, then the bad weather canceled the stop at Valencia and made us at least 8 hours late getting into Barcelona.

Also, shore excursions in Tunis and Algiers were awful, and should be avoided by anyone taking in this area. In Tunis, the brochure had pictures of ruins supposed to be Carthage. In fact, none existed and were blamed on marketing people in LA who had never been there. We did see Roman ruins of an aquaduct, which was exceptional. We saw no other ruins as they either did not exist or were a long way off in the distance and we did not stop. Our tour of the old Quarter got canceled by security, so we stood around quite awhile waiting for that to unfold to no avail.

In Algiers, which was even worse, the bus rode around and pointed out numerous interesting sites, but none of them were we allowed to stop. The only stop was a war monument dedicated to the communist-supplied irregulars who killed off the French until they were granted independence. Not much for those from the good old USA. The city itself is mostly white wash, pretty in old movies, but none of the building have been repainted after they kicked out the French in the 1950s. Pretty shabby looking.

Our stops in Sardinia, Malta and Barcelona were wonderful, great folks for tour guides in the first two places. We had decent tour guides in Africa, but all they would do is keep apologizing for the lousy tour as not being their fault.

The ship itself was wonderful, heated floors in the bathroom even, and a really nice makeup mirror. Nice large room too. Food was excellent as usual for Viking. Their entertainment was below what they had advertised, they said in the brochure they had a 1940s style bar, but it was just a group who performed supposedly Rat Pack music but we could only recognize a couple of songs sung by Sinatra, a tad odd.

The preview of Valencia was wonderful, but left us in the lurch when we could not go ashore due to weather, wish we could have traded one of the cities in Africa for Valencia, but not in the cards.

I might add, Viking has given us each a $250 voucher for another cruise, which can be used on the River cruises too. We missed a stop on a recent cruise on another line and they gave us a glass of bubhley for compensation and my husband does not even like the stuff.

We intend to use it of course, and it did temper our disappointment for missing out on some of the stops, plus the 70 mile hour winds and 21 foot waves, but not Vikings problem of course, it was ours for the choice of time as it fit our schedule and budget.