Here There and Everywhere

Christmas Market Lottery

The last month, everyone who signed up for a Christmas Market cruise in Europe started checking in daily with Bespoke Amsterdam Experiences, a niche but highly valuable service which shows you the water levels on the Rhine today, and predictions for a variety of days down the road.

It has been a wild ride. The waters began running very low in October. Some ships made it through the entire Amsterdam to Basel route, most did not. Sometimes the ships have done swaps to get around the particularly low areas, which means you get to one port and pack up and leave your suitcases outside the door. You get on a bus and go to a market location, and then on to a second ship, identical to the one you got off, and your luggage is waiting inside your identical room. It is mildly inconvenient, but you get to see all the sights you wanted to see.

We’ve done this before, with Tauck. It wasn’t bad.

Some ships this year have been competely rerouted. Some are going Amsterdam to Brussels, which is a totally different trip.

There is an option for a visit to Bruges, and Bruges is a city I absolutely love. I can imagine it could be a lot of fun, exploring Christmas Markets in old Dutch cites, but it is not the trip we booked.

Christmas Market at the Cologne Cathedral

On our last Rhine Christmas Markets trip, we got to spend a day in Heidelberg, where we have spend a lot of time in a previous life, and to visit Aachen, another city we love for it’s history and charm. I had also wanted to see Strassbourg and Colmar, which we visited, but I was not able to get off the ship – I caught a terrible cold, so bad I couldn’t function. AdventureMan visited on his own, and it was one of the saddest events in our traveling – being so near to places we have been before and loved, and not being able to share the experience.

So we booked it again.

A lot of people are totally freaking out about the changes. Us – not so much. The Tauck trip was perfect, right up until I caught the terrible cold, and that is no ones fault, like the tree in our back yard, just one of those things, an act of God. Often an unxpected change can have charm of its own. We just roll with it.

I do freak out over last-minute airline cancellations, so we pay Viking to manage all that for us. It happens more than we would like, but Viking kicks in, gets us on routes (often better than the original), and we get where we need to be.

This morning we got a letter from Viking telling us that the rivers are rising, and that they are optimistic our trip can proceed as planned. Wooo HOOO!

November 13, 2026 Posted by intlxpatr | Travel, France, Germany, Customer Service, Geography / Maps, Christmas, Advent | Rhine | Leave a comment