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Vienna was part bus, part walking. We stayed on the outside except we had time to go into the church (not a Sunday). We did get quite a bit of the history and a decent orientation to the city. We stayed in the city and took the metro back to the ship. Our guide gave a good orientation at the end. We went to the Albertina museum on our own. It was a nice mix of half small collection of famous artists and half palace rooms. Budapest is also part bus, part walking. Good orientation to the city and one of the easier ways to get to see heroes square and castle hill and hear some of the history. The cathedral was crowded since all the tours arrive in the morning. We went to the hospital in the rocks on our recent cruise. They have tours in English that last about an hour.

Viking air plus has been good about flying earlier or later but it used to be an extra $300 per ticket to fly into a different city. We usually fly business class and tickets from our small town usually are cheaper booking directly and we have access to more scheduling options. We recently returned from Viking’s grand European cruise. Quite a few people did not hear about the air schedule changes and cancellations from Viking.

We just got back from a 14 day cruise with several extra days on each end. We used our credit card almost all the time. The only pounds we spent were for tipping. We got about $50 worth of florints for 3 days in Budapest and would have been able to use a credit card for almost all of the expenses. I think we spent about 10 euros other than tips. Everything else went on our credit card. We keep a supply of euros since we travel to Europe frequently. Fellow passengers were unable to withdraw funds from the ATM. They had failed to notify the bank they were traveling. We have found a lot of ATMs have a maximum withdrawal of 200 euros.

Another major problem with Scenic is getting money back if you cancel a cruise. Yesterday we received our refund check for a cruise cancelled in December, 2021. I periodically emailed them asking for our money back. They kept replying it was taking time to process refunds. We totally enjoyed the pre pandemic cruises we took. Our TA complained about the difficulty dealing with Scenic back in 2018 and 2019.

We’re scheduled for a cruise in 3 weeks. We’re planning to take a PCR test about 12 days out. We don’t think we’ve had COVID but if we test positive we can call our doctor, do the quarantine and then get a doctor’s recovery letter good for 90 days. We thought that would be better than getting a negative antigen test just before boarding and then finding that we had been infected and asymptomatic but showing positive on Viking’s PCR test.

Has anyone had the eMed BinaxNow AG antigen test accepted for the pre board test? We’re going early and traveling on our own.