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This trip was a direct result of marketing efforts from Viking Cruises. My family and I are always talking about where we want to travel in the future. And sometimes the decision can be difficult. There are just too many places to travel.

So in the winter of 2016, Viking Cruises had a marketing event at the Hofbrauhaus in Columbus, Ohio where my parents and brother live. It combined two of our loves, travel and beer, so of course they went. Partly because my parents had been thinking about doing a Viking Cruise on the Rhine River in Europe. Viking is primarily known for their river cruises.

When my parents told me about it afterwards, they were surprised to discover that Viking had started to do ocean cruises. We each went out to the website to look at what cruises they have, and discovered a “Viking Homelands” cruise of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. We all got really excited about it, and very quickly decided that we wanted to do it.

We first thought about doing the cruise that summer, but they were already booked up. I ended up doing a solo trip to Bali instead. But we decided to do it for 2017 and booked it more than a year in advance.

This is what appealed to us about the Baltic Cruise:

  • Scandinavia had been near the top of my Mom’s bucket list for a long time.
  • The cruise would visit 8 countries in two weeks, and 7 of them would be new. The one repeat country was Germany, but there were excursions to Berlin. And my parents and brother had never been there.
  • One of the countries was Russia! That had been near the top of my bucket list for a while, and the cruise visited St. Petersburg. I had seen St. Petersburg on The Amazing Race a while ago and it looked stunningly beautiful.
  • It had been a while since we had visited Europe (except for my brief work trip to Paris), and we were excited about going back.
  • One of the main benefits of cruising is that it eliminates travel time during a trip. The cruise ship does that for you. So you just have to travel to the boat, unpack once, and travel back at the end. That makes it much more relaxing when you don’t have to worry about renting a car, taking trains, checking into hotels, and packing and unpacking over and over again
  • Normally on cruises you do guided excursions when you’re in port, which I would not want to do in Europe. However, 7 of our 11 ports were in cities with good transportation. And Rick Steves has a guidebook for Northern European cruise ports, which tells you exactly what to see and how to get around on your own. So we would be able to explore on our own most of the time!

Route Map

This in an interactive custom Google Map where you can find all the hotels, restaurants, and sights referenced in the individual blogs. View it in full screen to access a list of all these places.

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