An Epic Adventure - I

Episode 44 - An Epic Adventure - I

Hosts: Jan, Rob, & Jim, with guests Lillian and Larry Harrison. Jan, Rob, Lil, and Larry retell their epic adventure aboard a Viking River Cruise - the Grand European Tour from Amsterdam to Budapest. In this episode, they evaluate their experience with the Viking Cruise Line.

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Transcript

[Music]

LARRY: These are from our nephew who brewed beer in his garage in Colorado, went to beer school. Now he’s a brewer over in Brevard, North Carolina. These are his wedding...

LIL: These are their wedding favors.

JAN: Oh, cool.

ROB: That’s awesome.

LIL: This is called Happily Ever After, and this one was called Postnuptial Porter. So we each got two beers at the end of the wedding.

JIM: That’s great. When you say he went to beer school, see I used to call that Michigan State.

[Music]

JIM (voice-over): In November, Jan and Rob traveled in Europe on a Viking River cruise with friends Lillian and Larry Harrison. So we gathered as they regaled us with their epic adventure. They condensed 12 days into a few highlights, and I’ve condensed those highlights into a few episodes beginning with today’s review of how Viking River Cruises fits into their travel philosophy. I will leave the introductions to Jan.

[Music]

JIM: As soon as someone has a brilliant idea of what to call this episode.

JAN: We already do.

JIM: What is it?

JAN: We’re going to call it “An Epic Adventure.”

JIM: An epic adventure.

JAN: In honor of Lillian.

ROB: That’s right.

LIL: Yep.

JAN: So we’re here today, um, this is a great remembering time of the cruise we just took in November with our friends, Lil and Larry. They live in Franklin, North Carolina, but I got to work with Lillian in the same department at The Salvation Army for a century. I’m pretty sure it was a century. And, we worked…

LIL: It felt like it.

JAN: There are certain days. There were certain days. We worked together closely over a long period of time and know each other very well. And that’s been - that friendship has been one of the gifts that I’ve got to continue since leaving The Army that’s very important to me. It’s been one of Lil’s dreams - ‘cause Larry just is long for the ride, just to be honest. He’s not being dragged, but he is a long for the ride. One of Lil’s dreams for a long time has been to take a Viking cruise. We got to take one the year before. In talking to them about our experience, we came up with the brilliant idea that we should do one together, which is such a cool thing that happened. Because, as you know, you can’t travel just with anybody. Some of us have tried that before and it hasn’t worked well. So, I’m just going to say we traveled with very good friends. We come from common interests. All of us, Rob and I, and Lil and Larry, focused our adventures typically on national parks. We tend to be outdoor travelers. What we did on the Viking cruise is a little out of our norm. We did a lot of research before we went and decided on using Viking.

LIL: I looked at a few different videos about all the different lines. I also looked at blogs, tried to gather as much information as possible on the different cruise lines. You can do one that’s all casinos. You can do one that’s all spas and pampering and getting your nails done, your hair done. You can do things that are more adventurous. But you can also do Viking, which is for adults who want to learn.

LARRY: Everybody we had talked to in walking around towns and everything…

JAN: [laughing] Yes?

LARRY: …said that it was the best thing they ever did.

ROB: Yeah.

LARRY: So that kinda sold me. If I’m going to do one and spend the money, I want it to be the best, and I can’t imagine that there’s anything better.

ROB: It’s hard. Yeah.

JAN: You know, it’s interesting. I was thinking about how the four of us approach travel anyway, that travel is a financial priority in our lives. It’s the thing we’ve saved for and it’s the thing we do over other types of experiences or entertainment or purchases. So we, the four of us, took very seriously this choice because you want to get the most for your money. That explains to me the whole approach to the way we prepared for the trip.

ROB: I think Viking was a really good choice also because we had plenty of time on our own to do the things that we wanted. We decided we want to go back and see this or we want to do that. We walked a lot, especially in Amsterdam. But yeah, I mean, you get off the ship and you’re in a lot of places, you’re right there, and you’re right in the town. So, yeah, you just set off, you start walking, you explore, you find places and that I think also suits the way that we like to travel.

LARRY: Nobody under, nobody, you have to be over 18.

ROB: That’s right.

LARRY: I believe. No casinos, no spas, no fancy dress up for dinner.

ROB: Right. No fancy every night entertainment. I mean, they had things, but it wasn’t like performers or anything like that. It was people that came on board, local people, that had things to say or to do.

LIL: I would say that once you retire, your priority with travel is more about learning, about experiencing, about feeling where you go. When you’re working, it’s more - to me - it’s more vacationing than traveling. Vacationing is you want to be pampered, you want to put your feet up and you want to forget about all the hustle and bustle of your daily life. This is travel.

ROB: Yeah.

LIL: Um, and, there’s nothing like it. Just for a minute, I’d like to speak to what you said about the cost. You pay a lot of money. A lot of people work all their life to take a trip like this. I did a little math on this Viking trip, and we were in the hands of Viking for 376 hours. That comes to $41.56 per hour. Now, if that’s what you make, right, and you work 40 hours a week - you can laugh - it’s $86,000 a year. So, when you think about it in those terms and you think about planning for a trip, you realize that every minute counts. You’re paying $40 an hour already to be there. You want to maximize that experience. This is why you research before you go.

JAN: Can you see why Lil and I are friends? I just want to say right now.

JIM: Usually, I do a transcript of all of our episodes. I think this time I’m going to prepare a spreadsheet with all of your calculations.

JAN: You know, we would get together. There’s a lot to say about how Lil prepared for this trip that added to the value of our investment. I will, as we go along, do that. But we would get together and Lil and I would walk in with notebooks.

ROB: This is true. This is all true.

JAN: My notebook did not compare to Lil’s, I’ll just say. But we met for breakfast one morning before the trip in order to be sure we were on the same page, what we’re going to do, all of that. Lil walks in with charts and graphs. Larry walks in with nothing. Rob walks in with nothing. And I’ve got a notebook. And so, I lo[ve] - this is - I would follow Lil to the ends of the Earth because I would know she has a plan. What that means is, when we got off the plane, when we get to the hotel in Amsterdam, we have a very limited amount of time. It’s the same all the way through the Viking cruise. You stop at a city, you have a day, you have a few hours. So, you want to know as soon as you step off the boat, what are you going to do? How are you going to invest your time? Because mostly Lil prepared us for each stop. We already had reservations for things we wanted to do that were independent. We knew, you know, we had a plan for where we were going to go in that location and why this particular thing was important. So, I think anybody who travels, again, it goes back to traveling versus vacationing. You are preparing for this experience because it’s an investment in your learning. And that - "go with Lil" is all I’m saying. If you want to laugh, you can go with Larry. But go with Lil.

ROB: Yeah, I’m with Larry. [laughter] Going back to the difference between an ocean cruise and a river cruise, one thing about the Viking river cruise, and I guess most river cruises, is there is an included excursion in the price. I mean, you don’t pay extra for the ones that are included. Now, there are others that you can pay extra for, and we did a couple, and we’ll talk about those. Those were really good. I know we paid for it ahead of time, but they were excellent. They were local guides who knew what they were talking about, and it’s very educational. I don’t think we had a bad one. The only excursion that was a little bit of a disappointment was Nuremberg, because we were on a bus for an hour, just driving around, and we were tired. I think Jan slept through most of that.

JAN: It was depressing.

ROB: But anyway, the excursions are included. Your drinks with your meals, like Larry said, there’s no fancy dress-up or anything like that that you have to do. You have to be quick to get your table sometimes, because people are always hornin’ in on OUR table. But anyway…

LIL: We had a plan for that.

ROB: Oh, we did. We had a plan for that.

JAN: We planned. We strategized. We didn’t say, actually, what this cruise was. It’s Viking’s Grand European Tour, and it’s their premier tour of Europe, and it goes from Amsterdam to Budapest on three rivers, plus a canal in between. What else should I say about that?

JIM: Well, let me ask you this. Was the plan for this, “Let’s go on a cruise,” or was the plan for this, “Let’s go to Europe and use the river as the conveyance”?

LIL: We’re not big cruisers. But what you get with the river cruise is, let’s say when you drive across the United States. You’re driving all day, you’re tired, you sleep, the next day you do something, the next day you drive all day. With this, somebody’s doing the driving for you while you’re sleeping. So every minute that you’re awake is maximized. So that’s one of the things that I really love about this type of travel. They’re taking you to your next destination while you sleep. There’s never - for me personally, there was never a time that I felt like I didn’t get my money’s worth. Every day, every meal, every experience, every tour was above and beyond what you would have expected. It’s almost like every day was another surprise.

ROB: Yeah.

LARRY: Initially, when I got the Viking brochures, I was looking at the price, and straight into the recycling bin they went. Because I’m like, “Yeah, that’s not for us. We can’t spend that kind of money.” But then as I started researching, as the brochures kept coming, and I started researching, “Wait a minute. You get a tour in every location, every day, free. You have all your drinks included in your meals. You get three meals if you want to come back to the boat and then go back to the town.” So when I started looking at that, I started to see more value. And that opened me up to being more willing to spend that kind of money.

JAN: It’s so funny to hear this because Larry was the person sitting and trying to decide, “Is this really worth it?” I mean, Lil was all on board. And I think for Larry to say, “This is the best - I think you said this - the best vacation I’ve ever taken”…

LARRY: Absolutely.

JAN: Pretty close. So for him to say that after all is said and done is an endorsement of this mode of travel, and Viking’s approach to customer service is extraordinary.

ROB: So we arrived and the Viking people were there to greet us. We had to look for them a little bit, but we found them.

JIM: They had the helmets with the horns, right?.

ROB: Yes.

JAN: They had the Viking helmets on, right.

ROB: And then they got us a car, and Lil and Larry and Jan and I rode to the hotel, unpacked, and, you know, we never touched our luggage except to take them up to the room or did they take them up to the room?

LIL: They did.

JAN: They took them up.

JIM: You said you went to a hotel?

ROB: Yeah, they took us to a hotel in Amsterdam.

JAN: We took a pre-tour.

ROB: Yeah.

JAN: So we went to Amsterdam early because Amsterdam’s a city you want to spend more time in than the ship allowed. So there’s a pre-tour of Amsterdam with two nights, I think, in the hotel.

JIM: And was that through Viking?

JAN: Yes.

ROB: It was through Viking, but our tour guide was Lil.

JAN: Yeah, Lil.

JIM: Oh, very good. That’s very good. So you’re…

LIL: Uh…

JIM: …in good hands with this, yeah. I’m sorry, Lil. Go ahead.

LIL: The pre-cruise idea, it’s a good idea to take the pre-cruise extension, and here’s why. It takes the pressure off if you do have a late flight, if you have a problem, if you’re tired. It allows you to get a little bit adjusted to the time, and kind of get out and walk around after being on a long flight like that, which is also a good idea. So I would say, if you were doing one of these cruises, always do the pre-cruise extension. If you have to pick or choose between pre-cruise or post-cruise, pre-cruise.

JAN: Amen to that.

LARRY: And going forward, I would do pre-cruise and post-cruise…

[Laughter]

JAN: Well, that makes…

LARRY: …because the value will be there.

JAN: Yep. We felt that when we got to Budapest, and we really only got to taste that city a little bit, and we were aware that if we had stayed a couple more days, it would have been a different, a more complete experience.

LARRY: Right.

LIL: Absolutely.

JIM: Well, just as we’re about to set sail, do you know what pier running is?

LIL: No.

JIM: Look for videos about pier running, and you’ll see these videos of people who did not understand when the ship was leaving. And you see them running down the pier trying to get on board before - and usually what happens is, if the ship is going to wait, everyone is instructed to come to the side of the ship and welcome them on in their most sarcastic way possible. It’s pier running. But I thought about it. On a riverboat cruise, you wouldn’t have to do that. You just have to run along the river. You know, you just, “Oh, there goes my boat. I’ve missed it.” Then you can kind of go into like Jason Bourne mode. You just run ahead, get on top of a bridge, wait for the boat to pass underneath, jump on it, and you’re on it. But actually, I did hear that someone suggested you could, say, rent a motorbike or something in one of the ports, arrange with the ship ahead of time that you’re not going to be on board from one city to the next, but you’re taking a tour of the countryside. How do they know that you’re on board? What do you do there?

ROB: We have a…

JAN: Let Larry tell.

ROB: Yeah.

LARRY: You swipe your card going out and then you swipe your card - your room key - coming back in. Each person’s room key. So that way they’re tracking who we’re missing and then they make arrangements or whatever, I’m assuming.

JIM: Did they ever talk to you about what if you missed departure time?

ROB: Catch a train.

JAN: Yeah.

JIM: You just get to the next port?

ROB: The next port. Yeah.

JAN: Every day we get these Viking dailies, and it’s a wonderful document. It includes a lot of information about where you’re at, the weather, everything. But also, on each one are the phone numbers for the guest director, the program director, where the ship is actually docked while you’re there, because in some cities there could be multiple locations, like Amsterdam. So you have information that you can use if something goes wrong.

LARRY: One of the things that I had read was that a couple had used the Viking Air, and what happened was their flight was delayed majorly. And so what happened was when they got into the port, I mean the airport, Viking met them, took them straight to the boat, told them, “The chef has a dinner prepared for you” - this is 11 o’clock at night - “The chef has a dinner prepared for you, and your luggage will be in your room when you get done with your dinner.”

JAN: My gosh.

LARRY: And so that made me think Viking Air is the way to go, because if I booked a flight, I may have to catch the train to the next port. If I didn’t do the pre-cruise.

JAN: That’s one of the options with Viking, is you can let them book your air, and that is what we did, and it makes a lot of sense. But once we got on the boat, one of the things that is, to me, cool about river travel is I find it a very intimate travel. You’re in this river between, you know, going along, seeing the people on the shore, stopping, just kind of like stopping at their city. And it’s a small number of people that you’re traveling with. It’s less than 200 passengers. So you actually are familiar, on some level, with the people on the boat. We made good friends, Tom and Betty, on this trip, because, you know, Lil decides to discuss with Betty about, I don’t know what, something. You met up with them before we did and formed a friendship. And when you asked about, can you just use the boat for transportation? That’s basically what Tom and Betty, they went from city to city. They didn’t do very many of the tours. They would just go into the city because they had been there before and explore the city on their own. And, you know, we talked since we’ve been home about, if we ever did this again with Lil and Larry, that’s probably what we would do is go from city to city and just do stuff on our own and use the boat as our transport.

LIL: Well, you already have that orientation of these towns. So you have a feel for, you know, what is there and what you want to do that you didn’t do. And of course, Rob keeps a journal and I keep a journal.

ROB: Yeah.

LIL: And in my journal, I make notes about, we need to go back and do this or that. That’s all there. The places we ate, whatever things that, that stuck, you know, stood out to us. So yeah, I think, I think that that would definitely be, if you do it again, you do more on your own…

ROB: Yeah.

LIL: …and you, and you can go at a little bit different pace. Um, another word about Viking and the, and maybe the last word, we’ll see. When I talked to people, I can, they go, “Well, that’s, that’s an old people’s cruise line.” It’s kind of a misconception. The reason you see so many elderly people on Viking is because many of their cruises are long, because there’s an idea that it’s, it’s very expensive. Uh, when you do the math, it’s not. Um, and elderly people have the time to take these where people that are working, they don’t, and they cannot take their children because this is an adults only. That’s why you see so many elderly people. The tours and such are not tailored to, uh, people who are immobile in any way. Everything is tailored to whatever, whatever level of activity you want, you can maintain for the duration of the trip. You can do as much or as little as you like. So, just, just a word about that.

ROB: Yeah. We had everybody from - we had some folks that had walkers on the ship, and there were others that were younger than us. Um, so it, it was a, it was a good variety. And, uh, I, I keep thinking about the, the first thing we did on the ship was we have the, the uh, the lifesaver thing. We have to get our life preservers out from under the bed. And then we have to meet at our stations. There are three stations. And I, you know, watching some of these people try to put on a life preserver, there are going to be a lot of dead people at that ship ever goes down. A lot of drownings because, you know, they had some difficulty there. But, uh, for the most part - and they, and Viking always accommodated the people that couldn’t walk well, or they had a - what do they call it? - a, an easy…

LIL: Leisurely [LEH-zhur-ly].

ROB: Leisurely [LEE-zhur-ly].

LARRY: Leisurely [LEE-zhur-ly].

LIL: Leisurely [LEH-zhurly].

ROB: Leisurely [LEE-zhurly] group.

LARRY: Leisurely [LEH-zhurly].

ROB: Yes. Leisurely [LEH-zhur-ly] group.

JAN: Leisurely [LEH-zhur-ly].

ROB: Yeah. Davids would say leisurely [LEH-zhur-ly] group. Yes. Every evening before dinner, they have a, uh, the, the program director tells you about the next day’s stop, where we’re going to be, what the, uh, uh, the excursions, the included excursion and the ones that you can pay for, what those will be. Some of the highlights that we might see at that place. And that’s every evening. And then we get these Viking dailies in our room. Um, that’s we get it the night before about what’s going to happen the next day.

LARRY: Yeah. After dinner, when we get back to our rooms, those dailies are there for the next day…

ROB: Mm-Hmm.

LARRY: …but they also don’t just have the schedule, but they have something about the town that you’re going to be in some history of it, uh, two or three pages of that information, which is pretty, uh, pretty, uh…

LIL: Well…

LARRY: …exciting to have that.

LIL: …sunrise, sunset, temperature…

ROB: Yeah.

LIL: …a lot of, a lot of information to help you make prudent decisions.

JAN: But you’re right, Larry. One of the things Jim asked was about the food on the ship. How did they accommodate the local cuisine? And so that was what was cool about it. We ate on the ship almost every meal, but the food that was prepared was appropriate to the local place, as was the beverage, whatever beverages were served. It was about where we were going to be. And so we had the chef came out every night to tell us what dinner was going to be. And he would present the special menu of that night, which was a local cuisine menu, which you could choose to eat or not. But we always had the option to try new things while we were on the ship, which was great. So.

ROB: Oh, the other thing that Viking does well, and they did well on this tour, is accommodating Jan’s vegetarianism.

JAN: Oh yeah.

ROB: Everywhere we went, the excursion, the beer excursion, the meal that we had, I’m thinking, “Oh gosh.” They brought her a plate. It had eggs on it. It was, it was, you know…

JAN: …great.

ROB: And, and she’s not a beer drinker. So she got a glass of wine at every brewery we stopped at, and that was more wine than Jan has ever drunk in her life, I think.

JAN: It was great, though, because I - yeah, I don’t need to say any more about that. It was just a joy to be accommodated and not have to worry about that. You know, I don’t like people having to, I don’t like making it uncomfortable for other people. So it was great to not have to think about that.

ROB: Awesome experience. Johnny - who was the other, the other waiter that we had frequently?

LARRY: Cristobal.

ROB: Cristobal. Cristobal brought Jan something that had bacon in it….

LARRY: Oh, Johnny.

ROB: …and before it ever hit the table, Johnny, “No, no, no, no, no.” He grabbed it, took it away, and brought the vegetarian version.

LIL: He basically body checked his counterpart. It was amazing.

LARRY: But the food, the food on the, on the, on the boat is incredible. And you get the local fare, they get off at - the chef gets off at every, at every stop and goes buy something at the market. And that’s dinner tonight. Or you can pick off of a standard menu.

ROB: Mm-Hmm.

LARRY: Can’t say enough about what Viking does as far as the food and everything.

JAN: So, Larry, I, this is, I’m aiming this one at you because, thinking about river cruising, and I know what answer I want you to have, so this is unfair that I’m doing this, but what did you find one of the most interesting things about the time on the river?

LARRY: About the actual cruising on the river?

JAN: Yes.

LARRY: For me was - I - the locks.

JAN: There you go.

LARRY: I never saw, I never, I had never seen a lock. But to actually see one in the first time, you know, for the first time that we went into one, I - it was at night. I had no idea. But, I was sleeping with my curtains open, and what happened was I looked out and it was pitch black and I’m like, “Man, it is dark.” So I walked to the window and looked out, and there’s a wall about eight inches from, from my, from my window. And I’m like, “Wow! We’re in a lock.”

ROB: Yup.

LARRY: But that was incredible. And there’s so many of them, and some we, you know, I think there was 67 locks on the, on the trip, but what an amazing thing. And then sometimes we would be in the restaurant having dinner or lunch, and we come into a lock and all of a sudden here’s this concrete wall on both sides, on both sides of the, of the ship. And to me, the technology, and I just couldn’t get over that. And I was so excited about that.

LIL: You know, there were places that I would have liked to have spent more time. For example, Regensburg is one of those. Um, Nuremberg is one of those just because the nature of the bus tour. First of all, you don’t see everything from the bus, and then the part of the city they take you through, um, it’s, it’s, it’s depressing and emotional. Um, so, you know, I would say, yeah, that’s something that that would [be a] great thing to do in certain places. And particularly Regensburg and Nuremberg.

ROB: We should also say that Viking is not a sponsor.

[Music]

LARRY: But I can tell you it was worth every penny and I’ve often considered selling our house and doing river cruises from boat to boat to boat. That’s how we live.

JIM (voice-over): Europe, of course, is steeped in centuries of rich culture, but many of the stories our friends shared involve the region coming to terms with its more recent past. In our next episode, we will be Making Our Way from the Amsterdam of Anne Frank to the Hungary of the devastating and brutal Arrow Cross party.

Until next time.

[Music]