The bags hit the curb at 3:40 in the afternoon, twenty minutes before the desk opened for boarding, and by four we were three cabins deep into the paperwork. River ships do not have a terminal. There is a pavement, a pile of suitcases with tags on them, and a crew member with a clipboard who wants to know whether your passport matches the manifest. Our first hour on the Danube belonged to that clipboard.
Three passengers: my sister, our mother and me. She walks at her own tempo, slower than either of us, which meant the entire itinerary had to be built around that pace rather than around a list of sights. Everything below follows from that one constraint.
Cabin two, midship, and the reasoning
I booked deck two, midship, for all three of us, and the family questioned it. Deck five has the terrace and the lounge above it. My reasoning was noise and distance: the engines sit aft, the music sits above, and a cabin under the bar on a ship of a hundred and fifty passengers is a bad idea after ten at night. Deck two midship is two minutes from the lift, level with the reception desk, and close enough to the dining room that our mother could sit down before the queue formed.
The upgrade I did take was a window rather than an interior. On a river ship the walls are thin and the days are long, and an interior cabin for a passenger who does not leave the ship in port turns the trip into a week in a cupboard. My sister wanted the balcony and paid the difference herself; she used it twice, on the two afternoons we were sailing through a city.
What I paid for before boarding
The quote had four lines that people usually discover on the ship. Air, with an open jaw - in to Budapest, out of Nuremberg, so we never backtracked. A transfer from the airport to the hotel, and a second one to the pier, because the walk from the Danube embankment to the old town is not short with a rolling case. Travel insurance that covered a pre-existing condition, bought within a week of the first deposit, which is the rule most people miss. And gratuities, prepaid, so nobody in our cabin was handing envelopes to staff on the last morning - our mother would have found that mortifying.
The hotel night before sailing is not optional either. Our flight landed at 8:20 in the morning after a connection, and boarding is not until four. I gave us the day in Budapest rather than the risk of a delayed aircraft and a taxi to a departing ship, which is a sentence I have had to write to clients before.
I priced the optional excursions before we sailed, too. Six stops, six paid tours at around ninety euros a head - four hundred and fifty for the three of us for the week - and only three of them worth buying. Two of the towns are a walk of under fifteen minutes from the berth, which is the calculation most people skip when they take the whole package on the first evening.
Dinner at six, or at eight
River ships seat at six or at eight, and the choice gets made at the dock rather than on the night. We took six, because our mother eats when the kitchen opens and does not enjoy a room that has been loud for an hour before she arrives. My sister moved to the later table for the two evenings that ended in port, when nobody wanted to rush a dessert to make a sitting.
The food is not the reason to take this trip and nobody pretends otherwise. What matters is that a table is held for you every night, that the kitchen will put a plain plate in front of you without commentary, and that there is coffee at a counter from six in the morning for whoever wakes first. On our ship that was me, every morning, with the deck plan and a list of the walking distances from each pier.
The lock at four in the morning
The part of this trip I care about most happens while you are asleep. Somewhere after Bratislava the ship entered the first lock of the route, and the walls came past the porthole at walking pace with a rumble you feel in the bed frame rather than hear. I was awake for it because I always am, and the corridor outside was empty except for one crew member checking lines against the fenders.
The next morning at breakfast my sister asked what all the noise had been. I told her. She said she had slept through it. Our mother, three seats away, said she had watched the whole thing from her window and that we should have been up for it. That is the honest report of a river cruise: the itinerary you bought is the one you are awake for, and the rest of it happens anyway.
Nine minutes from the pier
Port logistics are where river itineraries are won or lost. In Bratislava the ship tied up about a nine-minute walk from the old town, and we were standing in front of the cathedral before the tour groups came off the coaches. In Vienna we moored at the bridge north of the centre, twenty-five minutes on foot to the Ring, three tram stops if you would rather not, and I had printed both options because the signage at that pier is not written for people arriving for the first time.
What group travelers get wrong on these sailings is the port day itself. They book the optional excursion for every stop, then discover that the ship docks ninety minutes from the town and the coach leaves at 8:30, which is the same hour the dining room opens. We took three excursions out of six and walked the other three. The two best hours of the week were an unplanned one in Passau, where the old town is ten minutes from the berth and empty at eight in the morning.
The ship cleared the last of the canal locks on the final night, and in the morning we were tied up with our bags on the pavement by nine. My sister asked whether I would do it again. Our mother, already halfway to the coffee machine, answered for both of them: only if the cabin is on deck two.