Rec and Sports

European River Travel – The Graceful Side of Cruising

As for many travelers, the idea of a cruise vacations may automatically conjure images of equatorial islands and cocktails sipped on the deck from a big oceangoing vessel. While this is a big component of cruises, there is a little-known alternative that is bound to delight you: European river travel.

If you are an old hand cruise patron looking for a new experience, European river travel will present you with a way to stay on the water when the tropical cruise period has ended.

Plus, with European river travel you will be able to visit many magnificent but little known places and sights, mostly inaccessible even to a standard Atlantic or Mediterranean cruise, while avoiding automotive traffic, airports, and big tourist crowds.

Most European river travel will involve visiting beautiful cities such as Vienna, Regensburg or Strasbourg, but you will also have a chance to sample nature’s delights in beautiful protected parks, and if you like mountains, the Alps and the Carpathians could only be a day trip away from your cruise boat!

There are lots of options for European river travel, both for the busy traveler who just needs a relaxing add-on to an existing trip, and to the leisured voyager who can take off weeks at a time to cruise at a slow pace. While self-catering options with small boats are available most river cruise ships on Europe’s rivers are outright floating hotels.

If you want to go the full way, the best trip that you can go on is a one-month voyage across the continent’s main rivers, the Rhine and the Danube, which are connected by canals in southern Germany. With this kind of trip, European river travel will take you all the way from Holland to the Black Sea.

This kind of European river travel will allow you to explore the charming lowlands of the Netherlands, the forested areas between Germany and France, with the incredible backdrop of the Rhine in this area, and then to cruise through Bavaria and Austria, Hungary, and finally to the well-preserved Danube delta in Romania.

If you are already accustomed to cruises on big liners, you will be pleasantly surprised by the pace and also at the level of personal attention that the ship crew will be able to give you on European river travel. As the groups of passengers are smaller, much more will be done to make sure that you will feel individually well cared for.

There are a wealth of things to see and do while enjoying European river travel, and you will finish the trip surprised by the experience. In fact, you may even decide to explore some other part of Europe by boat next year!

EuroRiverTravel.com is the premier resource for European river travel on the Net, with guides on matters such as how to cruise through several countries, as well as on booking the trip, preparing for the voyage, making the most out of the cruise – click the links above to find out more!