Down the Danube: Eight Countries in Fourteen Days

This is Part 2 of a three-part series on our Danube river cruise. Read Part 1: Our Race to the Danube for the travel saga that got us here, and Part 3: On Our Own in Bucharest for our days off the boat.

After everything it took to get here, the cruise itself felt almost unreal. Skye and I woke up in a different country nearly every morning, ate breakfast while a new shoreline slid by the window, and stepped off the ship into a fresh medieval town by lunch. I hadn’t realized how much genuine time on land a river cruise gives you, with real exposure to each place and its people, until I was living it. This is not the Caribbean model of being dropped at a beach for a few hours. This is history, one country at a time, and I loved it.

It helped that Skye found her people almost immediately. She became fast friends with Emma from Fort Worth, and later Mila, and the three of them turned the ship into their own floating summer camp while I got to sit with their moms, Sarah and Sara, wrapped in blankets on the top deck, chatting about everything and nothing over the water.

Vilshofen, Germany

Our first full day was in Vilshofen, the little German town where we boarded. We walked up a fairly steep hill to an abbey and earned a beautiful view over the town and river. That evening the ship threw its own Oktoberfest, complete with traditional German dancing, and Skye and I jumped right in. She has absolutely no fear on a dance floor, and she has a way of pulling me out of my introverted shell that I’m endlessly grateful for. We ate enormous pretzels, and she marveled at being able to order as many special drinks as she wanted, all included.

Cesky Krumlov, Czechia

To reach Cesky Krumlov we took a bus about an hour and a half across the border from Austria, and the ride turned out to be one of the most memorable parts of the day. Our guide, a woman in her late forties, grew up behind the Iron Curtain in what was then Czechoslovakia, before it fell in 1989, and she told us what that actually meant. Her family was never hungry, she said, but getting almost anything beyond food was nearly impossible. When she was six, it was decided she would have a bicycle. Word went around that bikes were being brought to town, so families stood in line for days, and when the day finally came, only two bikes arrived. People fought over them. Her mother got her one. It went the same way with a freezer, and with a car, which they eventually acquired, built a garage for, and essentially never drove. It had 40,000 miles on it after twenty years. The borders were closed and guarded with guns and dogs, there weren’t many places to go anyway, and fuel was expensive.

She told us the average Czech salary today is around $1,500 a month, so life is still not easy, but their taxes cover healthcare, childcare, university, and maternity leave. Then Covid came along and flattened years of hard-won economic progress, and they’re rebuilding again. Cesky Krumlov itself survived World War II unbombed, and the communist regime never much cared about it, so its centuries-old buildings are all still standing. The whole place is a living museum. You can practically picture knights in the streets. For lunch we did the most on-brand thing we could and found an Asian restaurant, this one called Saigon Asia, for a veggie stir fry and an avocado roll.

European architecture affects me in a specific way. It’s beautiful and it’s foreboding at the same time. The churches and castles broadcast ancient wealth, power, and intimidation, and while they’re striking, they don’t leave me feeling warm inside. What did was that evening, back near Linz, when I dragged a reluctant Skye out for a walk along the river promenade. We stumbled onto a long, complicated hopscotch course painted on the path, and she lit up and followed the whole thing and thanked me for making her come. It was a small, unscripted, unrepeatable moment, the kind you can’t plan or buy, and it was the highlight of the day.

The Wachau Valley, Austria

From the town of Weissenkirchen we took a short bus into Durnstein, a tiny medieval village of about 80 residents that somehow hosts over a million visitors a year. We tasted the region’s famous apricot products, but the real memory is Skye and Emma tearing around a little playground with castle ruins behind them, dark clouds gathering in the distance, and rays of sun warming our faces. That morning I’d also finally posted some photos to the Travel365 Pro social accounts. I started to write myself a little guilt trip about being the world’s worst business owner at social media, and then I stopped. Why would I talk to myself like that? I’m not a robot. I’m allowed to enjoy my own vacation without being productive every second of it.

Vienna, Austria

We started in Vienna’s city center on a ship tour, walking the grand sights beneath the massive, ornate buildings of the old Habsburg Empire. Then we hitched a ride back for lunch and spent the afternoon doing something completely unplanned: an amusement park. It turned into one of the most magical afternoons of the trip, all roller coasters and fun houses. One big coaster genuinely scared Skye and made her cry, and Emma wrapped her in the kind of huge, reassuring hug that only another kid can give. They got matching airbrush tattoos. Later they soaked in the steaming pool while Sarah and I sat bundled in blankets, talking easily over the glittering lights of Danube Island. Vienna is enormous and I barely scratched it. Cody and I need to come back and give it a proper visit.

Bratislava, Slovakia

We skipped the organized tour and did our own thing. Almost the moment we left the ship, a man on a bench let out an enormous belch, which felt like a perfect welcome to Bratislava, a city Cody and I have quoted from the movie Eurotrip for over twenty years. We climbed the steep steps and ramps up to Bratislava Castle while our friends peeled off to explore the old town. From the top you can see the whole layered history of the place at once, medieval buildings, ornate Habsburg facades, blocky Soviet apartments, and a couple of modern skyscrapers, all in one view across the river. On the way down we found a playground overlooking the city, where I bounced Skye on the seesaw and video chatted with Cody about how the house was coming along. Then we found an Asian restaurant and had some of the best avocado and vegetable sushi of the whole trip. I did not expect world-class sushi in Bratislava, but that’s how much has changed in the nearly forty years since the Iron Curtain came down.

That morning, before any of it, I’d gone up to the sundeck for a jog and been nearly knocked off my feet by the wind. As I ran laps, the gust shoving me down one straightaway and holding me back on the other, I marveled at where I was: on a boat on the Danube, in a part of the world I’d honestly never thought to visit, and now found endlessly fascinating. And I teared up, because a year and a half ago I was in such a bad place with panic attacks and constant fight-or-flight that I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel steady again. I did the work to understand what was happening to me and to get healthy, and standing on that windy deck between two countries, I felt how far I’d come. I’m proud of myself for that.

Budapest, Hungary

Our day in Budapest happened to land on the national holiday commemorating the 1848 revolution, which meant free entry to museums and public buildings and celebrations spilling through the whole city. We walked over the Chain Bridge, counting its eight stone lion heads, and climbed the winding path up to Buda Castle as the view got better at every turn. Spring was arriving in real time, tiny green leaves and blossoms sweetening the air under a deep blue sky. At the top we walked straight into a changing of the guard, a horse cavalry, and children and adults performing traditional folk dances and songs. We ducked into the free museums (partly, I’ll admit, for the bathrooms), made a couple of Independence Day crafts in the castle’s reception hall, and ate a plum and almond bar on a bench.

We met Sara and Emma at the Parliament building, where thousands of people had gathered waving Hungarian flags and wearing red, green, and white, with speeches and singing everywhere. The crowd was overwhelming and then, just as fast, it dispersed. We rode the ferris wheel, tried chimney cake at a sweet shop, and that night watched a Hungarian performance with dancers whose rhythmic slapping I still can’t quite describe. Skye got pulled up to learn a dance and balance a decanter of wine on her head. Dinner was fish and gnocchi, one of my favorites of the trip, and afterward the city put on a drone show for the holiday. There was one scary moment when a man slipped on the stairs and hurt himself, but the crew and another passenger cared for him until the ambulance came, and we were all relieved to see him walk to it himself.

Godollo and Pecs, Hungary

One day took us out to a farm in Domonyvolgy for a horse show, then to the restored Habsburg palace at Godollo. The highlight wasn’t the palace, though. It was the farm animals and the countryside just waking up from winter, dotted with the first tiny flowers. Back on the ship we scored a room upgrade to a higher deck with floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors and, blessedly, working heat, which meant the toilet seat was no longer made of ice. Skye and Mila became inseparable around this time, and watching the three girls giggle their way through thousand-year-old buildings in Pecs a day later, past ancient church ruins and into the most ornate church of the trip, was its own kind of joy.

Croatia

Croatia was the day I’d most looked forward to, because a trip here with Cody back in 2009 remains one of the best of my life. This corner of the country is brand new to tourism, and we happened to be the very first ship of the season, so the town met us at the dock with local food, bread, meats, and news cameras. It’s an agricultural region that hasn’t seen the economic lift that tourism brought the rest of Croatia, and you can feel how much they’re hoping it will come.

The most touching and confusing moment of the whole cruise happened here. An older man walked up to Skye, gently touched her face, spoke lovingly to her, and pressed a 10 euro note into her hand, miming licking an ice cream cone to show he wanted her to have a treat. Then a well-dressed woman appeared saying he wanted two 5s in exchange, and hurried off, and I stood there confused, trying to hand the money back. He refused to take it. Later another mom who’d watched the whole thing came over, sure the man was simply being grandfatherly and kind, and shared photos she’d taken that made it clear he’d given the money freely and expected nothing. I think his heart was pure, and I’m still not sure what the woman was up to. Travel is full of encounters you never fully decode.

The towns here wear their recent history openly. One building sits beautifully restored, and the next three are still pocked with bullet holes. And yet there are flowers absolutely everywhere, in boxes on the bridges and storefronts and in the newly green lawns, and I think that’s deliberate, a way of easing the tension of all that visible damage. Skye and I wandered to the river, found a playground ringed by old communist apartment blocks, photographed a resident stork taking flight (I’m genuinely proud of that shot), and bought a few things from a warm, grateful shopkeeper. It felt good to leave our money in her store.

Serbia

I’ll be honest: Belgrade was hard for me. Serbia’s ongoing refusal to recognize Kosovo has kept it out of the EU, and you can see how that’s stalled the country’s development compared to its neighbors, which left me frustrated and a little sad. The city itself felt heavy and worn to us that day. I’ve been to plenty of places with complicated pasts and loved them anyway, my own country included, so I want to hold this lightly. We had a beautiful lunch at a spot called Sakura, where the server, an English professor waiting tables for the fun of it, was lovely.

The next day at Golubac Fortress was a rebound. It’s a dramatic, newly restored fortress you can climb through on narrow stairs and ladders, and one passenger who happened to work in workplace safety cheerfully tallied every code violation as we went. Our cruise manager shared her own story of growing up under communism, and there was hardly a dry eye in the lounge. Then we sailed through the Iron Gates, the gorge where the Danube narrows dramatically, while a scratchy old Romanian song played over the speakers and set the mood perfectly. They’d run a safety drill beforehand, and when I joked to the cruise director that the passage must be dangerous, she said, entirely seriously, that at 300 feet deep it’s the spot we’re most likely to drown. I decided to enjoy the view. And I learned to smuggle a Danish pastry off the breakfast buffet to enjoy as an afternoon treat, one of my better decisions of the trip.

Bulgaria

In Vidin we did a bike ride and explored a fortress with wonderfully unsafe-feeling creaky wooden stairs and slick, ancient stone steps, and caught both a town performance and a children’s performance of traditional dance. We picked up bikes and rode through town, helmets on, past a big colorful ВИДИН sign and along the river.

Veliko Tarnovo was spectacular, a city built right into the cliffs with a river gorge splitting it in two, a whole street of craftsmen, and an annual festival in full costume. We picked up a little carved wooden horse as a souvenir. The only sour note was a chef’s table dinner where a fellow passenger decided to quiz me on my politics and drew her own conclusions about me from my answers, which made for a tense meal. I’ve learned that the ship, like the world, comes with all kinds of people, and most of them are wonderful.

Fourteen days, eight countries, one river. What struck me most, running laps alone on that windswept deck between borders that have been redrawn so many times, is how the world manages to feel enormous and microscopic all at once. I’m so grateful I got to see this part of it, and even more grateful for who I got to see it with. And I have the best husband in the world, who supported the three of, well, two of us going on a two-week luxury cruise while he stayed home building our house out of a giant dirt pile, and never once made a jealous or snide comment about it. He’s amazing.

In Part 3, we get off the boat and take on Bucharest entirely on our own.