Regretfully, I have not updated this blog since our trip to Ecuador six and a half years ago, despite a wonderful vacation in Ireland and two fascinating trips to the Canadian Maritimes in the meantime. With our trip to Europe on Scenic’s Jewels of Europe river cruise in May and June 2023, it was time to preserve some new memories.
Scenic Luxury Cruises is little-known in the United States, where most people think of Viking when they think of river cruises, where name recognition follows marketing. Scenic, an Australian company, does little to no advertising in the United States, although it offers the pinnacle of luxury in all-inclusive river cruises. We had been on two Royal Caribbean cruises on floating cities 20 or so years ago, and I found those to be unpleasant experiences in crowd management. Especially after our experience in the Galapagos Islands on the Grace, which holds a maximum of 16 guests, I wanted something a bit more intimate. Scenic met the bill, with small ships, gourmet dining, unlimited beverages, and little things like e-bikes and butler service.
Our ship, the Scenic Jasper, carries a maximum of 163 guests, where we stayed in a Deluxe Balcony Suite on the Diamond Deck. Not surprisingly, because the company is heavily marketed in its home base of Australia, about half of the guests were Aussies, with others from New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, 10 or 12 of us from the United States, another 10 or 12 from Canada, and a smattering of other countries. Having an Australian Shepherd (back home in a kennel at the time) did not help us to understand Australian “English”, so we tended to migrate toward our fellow American and Canadian passengers. That said, I was considered a good sport for trying Vegemite on toast one morning at breakfast!
Our Jewels of Europe cruise took us from Budapest to Amsterdam over the course of two weeks on the Danube, Main and Rhine Rivers, passing through a series of 68 locks. We visited the countries of Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Germany, and The Netherlands, spending an extra day in Budapest prior to the start of the river voyage and an extra day in Amsterdam at the end. Spoiler Alert: Our favorite countries were Germany and Hungary.
Our trip began on Saturday, May 20th, with a Delta flight from Boston to Amsterdam, then Amsterdam to Budapest on KLM, a Delta partner. We made a poor decision to park at Massport’s Logan Express parking facility in Framingham. Little did we know that we would be leaving in the pouring rain, on the second of three days of Taylor Swift concerts in Boston, forced to park in the overflow parking lot, and with a bus driver who made Roseanne Barr seem like Miss Congeniality. The Delta Sky Club was a welcome respite prior to boarding, and our Delta One seating on the Airbus 330-200 to Amsterdam (with seats that convert to beds) was the best possible way to fly against the sun through six time zones.
Arrival at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, particularly when jet-lagged, was a less than pleasant experience, with unbelievably long lines to get through the mandatory passport control checkpoint, seriously inconveniencing any and all passengers from outside of the Schengen Area (which primarily consists of countries within the European Union). Having TSA PreCheck and a Known Traveler Number means nothing outside of the United States. Ultimately, we boarded our KLM jet for the two-hour flight to Budapest, where our arrival was much more pleasant, being immediately greeted by a Scenic representative who directed us to our taxi driver who would be taking us to the Marriott hotel, where we would be staying on our first night in Budapest, prior to boarding the Scenic Jasper.
Click on the links below to follow our tour in sequence.
Otherwise, if you scroll down from this post, you will view the posts out of sequence but based upon when in the process they were written.
- Budapest, Hungary
- Vienna, Austria & Bratislava, Slovakia
- Dürnstein & Melk, in the Wachau Valley of Austria
- Salzburg, Austia
- Regensburg, Germany
- Nuremberg, Germany
- Bamberg, Germany
- Würzburg and Weikersheim, Germany
- Miltenberg, Germany
- Rüdesheim & The Rhine Gorge, Germany
- Cologne, Germany
- Amsterdam, The Netherlands