Danube River Cruise, June 13-26, 2023 – The Intergalactic Tourist

Although I had lived for 11 months in Russia in 1972-73, I had seen little of Eastern and Central Europe, and I really wanted to visit the three great capitals of Budapest, Vienna and Prague as well as points in between. I had several friends who had done Danube cruises and were very pleased with them; one of them had been on a cruise with Gate1 Travel and highly recommended them. So as soon as the pandemic subsided, Sandie and I booked a Danube River Cruise with Gate1 for April 2023, with a preliminary sojourn in Budapest and an extension to Prague. We made the booking in April 2022, a year ahead of time. In October 2022 Gate1 called and said that the April cruise had been cancelled, and offered to book us for the same trip in June instead, at the same price. We eagerly took them up on it.

In retrospect it was unfortunate for us that the trip was delayed, for two reasons: (1) It turned out unseasonably warm in June; Central European temperatures normally run in the 70s-80s Fahrenheit, but in June 2023 they were in the high 80s and low 90s. (2) Also between April and June 2023 Sandie developed what we later found out was a heart condition, and between the heat and not feeling up to snuff, she wasn’t able to take part in all the activities we signed up for. In spite of that, we both managed to enjoy ourselves, especially since the Gate1 folks did their best to accommodate our specific needs.

The tough part was the air travel – though not so much the flights themselves as the airports. Our flight out took us from Palm Springs to Dallas, thence to Heathrow, and from there to Budapest. The return was from Prague to Heathrow, thence to Dallas, and Dallas to Palm Springs. The flight from Palm Springs left at 6 AM, so we had to get up in the middle of the night to make it. That was the least of our travails. Dallas and Heathrow are both huge airports, and it’s not easy to find one’s way around them; when you have to make a connection, and go through all the security hoops with your carry-ons, and you have very little time to do so before your next flight leaves, and you are under the weather anyway, it can be a nightmare. Fortunately we were able to get help in both airports, both coming and going. Even so, in Heathrow we weren’t able to make the Budapest flight, and it turned out it was cancelled anyway. We had to hustle to get on another flight for the same day, and we were only able to do so with the help of a woman from Kenya, an airport employee, who went above and beyond the call of duty to cajole and browbeat the airline people into doing what they should have done in the first place. In the upshot, we arrived in Budapest six hours later than our scheduled time, without checked luggage (I had one large suitcase; Sandie’s bags were all carry-on), and we missed the welcome meeting, but at least we got there the same day and didn’t miss any of the next day’s activities. And Krisztina, the Cruise Director, herself took me in a taxi to the airport next afternoon to fetch my suitcase.

On the way back, it was almost the same story, except we didn’t miss our Heathrow connection, thanks to the efforts of another airport employee, this time a woman from the Sudan. These two women, and my guess is that they are both current or former refugees, were amazing and I’ll be forever grateful to them.