kcpvwill

Tom-UK We are in the UK and our 20th cruise with Viking is coming up soon. We are 20 mins from Manchester Airport and in Europe we have had flights with KLM, Air France, and BA. Also Lufthansa, Air Malta, Vueling and SAS depending on the destination. Each involved a change which is tedious, especially as we are not getting any younger. (Started with Viking in 2013) For our next cruise we found direct flights at times to suit from Manchester with SAS to Stockholm and back from Oslo with SAS. We asked Viking to book us on them and they have done that for us. We hope that you will come to enjoy Viking as much as we do.

What are these ducks? Not seen any on the cruises we’ve done.

I love the bird sounds and hope they will be on Neptune when we embark in August for our 20th cruise with Viking. (Ocean & River) Perhaps ONE person has complained and as is the norm these days in the UK ,that person gets their way. Hope it’s not the Viking way.

We did the Kiel canal cruise in 2018 and really enjoyed it. Viking doesn’t do it anymore which is a shame, perhaps it wasn’t popular.

Yes we got one too from the UK Destinations Travel show in Manchester from the Viking stand. Great to chat to the many people from the London office who have helped with our 20 Viking cruises. The handles are long enough for a shoulder carry.

I regularly get a hot chocolate from the lounge on deck 1 as my bedtime drink. They make it with hot milk. Sometimes it is not very hot but they quickly get used to me so I don’t have to stress the ‘hot’ Further into the cruise I sometimes just have hot milk to limit the calories as the hot chocolate is rather sweet. World Cafe also has sachets (occasionally need to ask for them) which you can take to your room and make yourself if you’ve asked for a kettle. The coffee maker boils water but trying to make chocolate or tea using this does not work well so we usually request a kettle.

We tendered in Leith on our Edinburgh stops when we did Edinburgh on the British Isles Explorer as a B2B with Midnight Sun. Leith is within walking distance of the Royal Yacht Britannia and we booked our own tickets online. Very good value and fascinating for an ardent Royalist like me. You could just walk up to get tickets when we went. There was lots to do and you can stay as long as you like. You get an audio guide and can do as many links as you want. On the other leg we went into Edinburgh and did the included panoramic and then at free time we left the guide (not forgetting to tell her) to do our own thing in Princess Gardens. We then got the shuttle bus back to the ship, they run every 30 minutes. We were lucky it was not the Fringe, Festival or Tattoo as during those times traffic grinds to a holt.

Not many on our roll call yet (on Neptune in August) to have a M&M but will await more.

That sounds so nice. We have only been to one official Meet & Mingle before the pause but it was nice to put faces to some regular CC posters. I hope they return soon.

Meet and Mingle for CC member gatherings were paused during Covid and this is still the case. Have they just been discreetly dropped or are they likely to return? I know some people organise their own unofficial ones on some sailings.

Assuming this is not a Viking announcement then, but a joke.

Has there been any announcement about re-routing round Africa yet?

Has there been an announcement about re-routing round Africa or not?

We tendered in Dun Laoghaire on BIE and the sea looked deceptively calm. Unfortunately it wasn’t and the trip to shore took nearly 30 minutes and I’d not taken my travel sickness pills. I was so queasy I couldn’t countenance a coach to Dublin. Found a place to buy pills and after an hour or so returned to the ship. We were told that the problem was not the waves, but the current and wind combination which played havoc with the tender. We had to circle the ship and wait for a calmer time to get back on Venus. Another time I’ll take the pills regardless! Good luck to the OP, ericosmith

Formernuke I believe you are right, London is cosmopolitan and caters to tourists. We rarely go. In the NW where we live “keep left” is standard everywhere.

The tours on the change over day were only offered once on board and turned out to be long days of 10-12 hours, which are beyond our capabilities nowadays. We would have liked to go to Ostia having been to Rome 10 years previously when we were fitter. We complained that none of the included tours was suitable for us and the excursions manager said he would feed this back. We did take the port shuttle bus to the town and did an ‘Adventure Lab’ which is a GPS enabled treasure hunt linked to Geocaching. It took us to some nice sites and a decent walk. Note the shuttle is run by the port authorities just to get you out of the dock area. They take a 90 minute lunch break and the times are not fixed.

Of course going clockwise keeps you away from the rails if you keep right when walking/jogging as in the USA, whereas those of us from the UK who keep left would be nearest the rails. We have the same problem on the stairs, as we keep left for that too. Airports seem to have adopted keep right too even in the UK as we are in the minority worldwide. We septuagenarians take a time to adapt, so please forgive us onboard.

We were on Viking Venus in October and we also encountered loud and simply rude passengers during the Explorer Society Gathering. They talked laughed shrieked and drowned out the speeches and entertainment. I felt so sorry for the speakers and entertainers involved. It was the first and hopefully last time this happened on our 19 (Ocean and River) cruises with Viking. Looking forward to our 20th next year being peaceful!

We had the same problem as Baron Baracuda when on Viking Venus in October in the Mediterranean. Most days the live TV was down and we had no sea days. Not sure why this happened. We were able to access news most of the time on our tablets so it wasn’t a big issue, just surprising as we’d not had this problem so much on previous cruises with Viking (11 ocean and 8 river) Looking forward to our 20th Viking cruise next year and hoping some new itineraries will be announced in Europe soon.

Our Monaco stop this year was supposed to be a tender (red anchor shown on invoice) as well, but in the end we docked. A previous Viking cruise a few years ago was just the opposite, should have been port, turned out to be tender. Often don’t know till you get there.

We got no TV coverage on Venus in October in the Med.

We were on Venus, 14th - 28th October and had virtually no live TV throughout except for scrambled / pixelated. Usually just message that it was not available. The internet wasn’t too bad though. I wonder if Venus was awaiting an update. We did not get the letter that the OP posted. Perhaps those on Venus might let us know if it has been updated and is working .

As a matter of interest, why is it called Viking Vela? Is Vela a star or other astronomical body?

I think all the non-included excursions still went ahead but they were very long days! People were returning to the ship, some after a 12.5 hour excursion about 9pm.

We’ve just returned from Viking Venus which docked in Ravenna, some 90 miles from Venice. There were ‘Venice on your own’ excursions which took 3 hours to get there and of course 3 hours to get back. So about 3.5 hours actually there. A very long day. We opted for the included Ravenna Mosaics excursion instead.