My husband and I will be celebrating our 40th and want to take a cruise this summer. We have done a couple of huge ship cruises and are less than in love. We would like to do something on a smaller ship, because we like cruises in general.
I keep getting brochures in the mail from Oceania, which look good. I’m particularly interested in one that skims around Northern Europe in June. River cruises are also on the table although a friend who went on one recently pointed out that you don’t usually dock where you can walk to things, so lots of bus time.
Does anyone have any wisdom to share? I’ve been on Cruise Critic, but most of the smaller lines have few reviews.
My friend went on a small boat to Alaska. They had kayaks and guides and all passengers could choose whether to go on a guided hike or kayaking trip at many points along the cruise. They had a great time!
Best small cruise ship I’ve heard about was the one around Bora Bora and that area…can’t remember the name…but it was small. Paul Gaugin maybe?
ETA…here is the link to their cruises. My friends raved about it!!
I’ve heard outstanding reports from people who have done Lindblad Expeditions. If/when we do Alaska, this will be how we do it. It’s the only way I’ll ever do a cruise again; we did not enjoy the big cruise ship experience. They partner with National Geographic to provide these expeditions and some of the crew members on the ship are National Geographic employees. One of them is designated just to teach and help people with photography. The people I know who have done them have done Alaska and the Antarctic.
Thanks! Looking at the links.
When my friends did the Paul Gaugin cruise, one of Jacque Cousteau’s sons was on the boat…did presentations, ate dinner with the passengers. They said he was terrific.
Well rats, their North Sea June trip starts at $13,000 per person. In my next life I want to be the naturalist on a Nat Geo tour ship! (I currently have second best job - teaching science to kids!)
Has anyone done a river tour not with Viking?
Someone – CardinalFang? Wrote about AMA cruise and seeing Holland tulips, which sounded lovely.
When we took the ferry from Vancouver to Vancouver Island this summer (I think about 90 minutes) they had a naturalist on board that gave a 45-minute presentation. I thought, wow, what a cool job to have. She barely had time to cover whales. I don’t think the Alaska cruises we looked at were that much, but it would probably be a once in a lifetime trip for us as I’m just not as keen on going to the other places they go to, but the North Sea would be beautiful, too. Good luck finding something.
My brother just returned from an Oceania cruise and just raved over it. He has cruised quite a lot, and definitely like it better than the large-ship cruises. He also liked it better than Azamara.
Thanks EVD
It also depends on your definition of small and what you like to do. We’re headed out on our second Windstar cruise on Saturday. This one only has 138 passengers (Wind Star) while the first (Wind Surf) had about 300. These are also different in that they are very casual, no dressing up beyond collared shirts and there is very little in the way of entertainment. The good thing is there are sails (yay!) which actually get used when the wind cooperates, and the ship is small enough to dock in smaller ports where the big ships can’t go. I’ll let you know how the really small ship works out in about a week!
I’m also taking the AMA river cruise that CardinalFang took last year. My mom and I are headed to Amsterdam in April, but since it’s my first river cruise I won’t have anything to add until then.
Teriwitt, one of my sorority little sisters is with the Wash Parks Service. I think whale guide is everyone there’s ideal job.
Runnersmom, Windstar is my dream cruise. Please follow up. My worry is that my husband has some mobility limits (previous nerve tumor resulting in numbness in one leg ). How agile do you need to be to board and disembark, and to climb between decks?
I went on an AMA Waterways river cruise to see the Netherlands. Sometimes we were met at the docks by busses for tours, but maybe half the time we could walk from the ship to whatever it was we were touring: windmills, Amsterdam, Antwerp, a charming canal town. And sometimes when there was a bus tour, I didn’t take it, but instead took one of the bikes from the ship and took a bike tour.
The highlight of the tour was the Keukenhof tulip garden. We stayed for four hours, but we would have been happy to stay all day. The Keukenhof is enormous, and so beautiful and spectacular that you can stand anywhere and point your camera in any direction and you’ll get a gorgeous photo.
I liked the tour a lot. I think I persuaded at least one other CCer to do the same tour this year. Oh, yes, now I see above that it was runnersmom. I hope you enjoy your cruise as much as we enjoyed ours, runnersmom.
A travel agent we happened to meet on our cruise said that AMA Waterways and one other line whose name I now forget were regarded as more high-end river cruises, and Viking was mid-level. Certainly the food and service on our AMA cruise was top-notch.
Even thinking about the cruise makes me happy, all the more so as I went with my mother as well as Mr. Fang and my sister. Mom just had a stroke and will probably not be able to do any more travel. I’m delighted that we could enjoy a special trip just before it was too late.
Is 500 people “small” for you? If so, you might look at http://www.voyagesofdiscovery.com/
We took a cruise with them to see a total solar eclipse in the South Pacific several years ago. The Paul Gauguin was the only other cruise ship to see that eclipse, since it didn’t touch land. (Closest land was Pitcairn Island of Mutiny on the Bounty fame.) The ship they had then was 700 passengers and was the twin ship to the one used in filming The Love Boat. Their current ship is 540 passengers. We had a wonderful time on that cruise: great crew, great food, great stops at Moorea, Pitcairn, and Easter Island, and excellent guest speakers for the nerdy eclipse chaser passengers. We were the only ones on the cruise with young kids, and the kids got treated like royalty.
But, you may be looking for something even smaller.
I have no interest in the behemoth cruise ships so I am also interested in this. I would like a smallish one for an Alaska cruise.
We did a yachting voyage on SeaDream http://www.seadream.com/ which was very enjoyable because it’s smaller. Only 56 couples and a crew of 95.
Backroads Tours has teamed with AmaWaterways https://www.backroads.com/award-winning-tours/river-cruising to offer river cruises. I haven’t done any of the river cruises yet but the active tours are first rate.
In 2014 My husband and I did a Seine river cruise the AMA. It was wonderful.
Last August we did a Danube cruise with Viking, but only because the most similar one offered by Ama clashed with the period of time H could get off work. Never again will we do Viking.
In 2017 we plan to do the AMA from Basel to Amsterdam, with the extension in Zurich and Lucerne, actually beginning in Switzerland, ending in Amsterdam.