Well the time has arrived for our next big adventure. On Wednesday, April 23 we fly from Portland to San Francisco where we board our flight to Paris. We will be flying United Polaris Business Class. We have the two seats in the middle. We will see how long the partition between us stays down during our 11 hour flight.
Once arriving in Paris we should be met by our Viking representative and transported to our hotel, the Pullman Paris Tour Eiffel. It is located just a few blocks from the Eiffel Tower.
We are in Paris for three nights and have scheduled a tour to the palace in Versailles. If all goes as planned we will be taking the high speed train from Paris to Bordeaux.
Arriving in Bordeaux we will be taken to our boat, the Viking Forseti. We will do a seven day round trip tour through some the world's finest (after Oregon's) wine country.
The boat is a Viking Longship that carries 190 passengers and has a crew of 53.
Following our French river cruise we will take a flight to Lisbon where we will stay two nights at the Corinthia Lisbon Hotel.
We have included tours during our stay in Lisbon before driving north along the coast to meet up with our boat, the Viking Helgrim, in Porto. From here it will be a roundtrip seven day cruise to explore the countryside and vineyards of the region.
The Helgrim is about half the size of our boat in France holding just 106 passengers and 33 crew. The size of the ship is determined by the size of the locks and the height of the bridges we must transit on our tour along the Douro River.
On May 13 we will arrive back in Porto and at 6 a.m. (yuck) fly to Frankfort where we have a four hour layover before boarding our United flight for the 11.5 hour return trip to San Francisco, and then on to Portland.
We will look forward to sharing some pictures and details of our trip as we go.
