OwenSmith

Is there a 2024 thread yet?

Length makes a difference on all rivers. 135m ships can't sail on the Seine, and on my recent Bordeaux cruise the captain told me that is not because of the locks on the Seine but because 135m ships can't navigate some of the bends. Most companies use 110m cruise ships on the Seine as a result, Viking have built custom length ships a little longer (124m if I remember correctly but annoyingly Viking always quote in feet). I rejected MS Swiss Ruby for a Seine cruise, I'm not about to cruise the Elbe on her. The Seine gets many of the old ships in Europe, and some of them like Swiss Ruby are cramped with very small cabins. Eventually companies had enough 135m ships for the Rhine/Danube system that they started to move 110m ships to the Seine, at which point some of them were nice enough we did a Seine cruise with Riviera.

You haven't heard the half of it, there were so many things wrong on our Noble Caledonia cruise. We have more anecdotes from that than all our other cruises put together. It's funny now but by week 3 we were wondering whether we'd survive.

Having cruised with Noble Caledonia once in 2008 I don't ever want to again. It was an epic 3 week cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow then back to the Volga all the way down to Astrakhan. What we saw was amazing, but it is the only holiday I have ever lost weight on. Even some locals that joined the cruise for 3 days on honeymoon didn't like the food. We bought breakfast cereal, dried fruit and biscuits at a supermarket half way through to supplement meals, but it wasn't enough. Also Noble Caledonia charter Elbe Princess II from Croisi Europe, and having looked on Croisi at the ship the cabins are tiny and the ship looks pretty basic.

It's not going to be November/December for us. It's also a shame about the restricted set of cruise lines on the Elbe. We'd like to sail into Prague but CroisiEurope's fixed menu for dining ("Chef's Choice" they call it) just isn't an option, there's too many things both of us don't like to eat. Most of the other Elbe cruise lines are too down market for us to consider, so our choice ends up being Viking almost by default.

My mum wants to do Elegant Elbe on Viking. We're flexible on dates and are more interested in choosing a time of year least likely to be disrupted due to water levels (low or high). Based on reading this thread, April or the first half of May look like the best best. Any comments? I know nothing can be guaranteed, I'm just looking to improve our odds.

My understanding is that if the flow from the rivers is too low the ships can't get into some of the ports or landing stages even at high tide.

Is there an equivalent to this thread for water levels river cruising around Bordeaux ie. rivers Dordogne, Garonne and Gironde?