This past July, Janet and I enjoyed our first European river cruise. We sailed with Avalon Waterways — the river cruise arm of the Globus family of brands — on the Mosel River in Germany.

If you're asking why Avalon and why the Mosel rather than a better-known line on a more popular itinerary, those are fair questions. The honest answer is that we were invited. Our Globus business representative asked us to join her on a travel agent familiarization cruise, and the Mosel itinerary was her choice. For us, it was more about the experience than the destination — and the opportunity to travel alongside someone who knows the product cold was one we couldn't pass up. Traveling with supplier reps lets us learn more than we ever could on our own, and it deepens the working relationships that pay dividends for our clients down the road. We still paid our own way — at a discount, but we paid. Anytime a supplier rep invites us along, we try to go, even when it means covering the tab ourselves.

Our Itinerary

The Mosel River flows from France through Luxembourg and into the heart of Germany's wine country before emptying into the Rhine. The itinerary took us through some of the most scenic countryside in western Germany. We toured medieval villages, explored castles that have been standing since before the printing press, and absorbed as much of the history and culture of the region as a week would allow. One of the things Janet and I love most about travel is the opportunity to experience different cultures up close — meeting locals, sampling the food, walking streets that have been walked for centuries. River cruising delivers all of that at a depth an ocean cruise simply cannot match. We fell in love with it.

Peculiarities of River Cruising

On an ocean cruise, your itinerary is defined by the ports a large ship can access — which typically means a dedicated cruise terminal a bus ride away from anywhere interesting. Not so with river cruising. European waterways carry people and cargo the way highways do in the U.S., which means river ships can dock in the heart of the places you came to see. We didn't spend hours on a motorcoach to reach our destinations. We walked off the ship and were there.

That combination of organized tours and self-guided exploration was one of the great pleasures of the trip. The river does create a few wrinkles, though. During peak season, docking space is limited. If another ship is occupying your scheduled berth, your ship ties up alongside and passengers walk across one ship to reach the next and then onto land. For ocean cruisers this sounds strange. For river ships, shared moorings are simply a way of life.

One caution worth raising: river cruising is not easy for guests with significant mobility limitations. Ship elevators don't reach the top deck, which means at least one flight of stairs is required to exit at some ports. Getting from ship to shore can also be awkward — particularly when you're moored alongside another vessel and have to pick your way across their deck, stepping over power cables and water lines. Gangways can be steep and their handrails are not always confidence-inspiring. Guests who use a wheelchair will, in most cases, find themselves unable to leave the ship at port. And even guests who manage to reach shore will encounter cobblestones in nearly every village on the route.

For most travelers, none of this rises to the level of a real inconvenience. The reward for putting up with any of it is the chance to walk straight off the ship into some of the most beautiful and historically rich scenery in Europe. Most mornings we found something spectacular within a five-minute walk of our mooring spot.

Water Levels

A river cruise requires a degree of flexibility that ocean cruising does not. Water levels change with the seasons, and itinerary adjustments are part of the deal. The summer we sailed, news coverage of low water conditions on Europe's rivers was particularly dramatic — there is a version of that story in the press almost every summer, but this year it had more teeth than usual.

The problem is real, but it isn't new, and modern river ships are engineered for it. They're built with shallow drafts and ballast systems that allow them to operate in low water. Their upper decks collapse down on hydraulic stilts to squeeze under bridges when rivers run high. That collapsible architecture is also why the ship's elevator doesn't reach the top deck — the hydraulics that lower the bridge need the clearance.

When conditions push beyond what the ships can handle, river cruise companies have two approaches: arrange bus tours to cover the affected portion of the route, or offload passengers and luggage on one side of the obstruction and transfer them to a different ship on the other. Most lines operate multiple vessels on the same river, and the ships are built to be interchangeable for exactly this reason. The transfer process is designed to happen while guests are ashore on tours, so the main inconvenience is packing and unpacking mid-cruise — not ideal, but manageable if the alternative is finishing the trip on a bus.

One of the things we appreciated about Avalon is that being part of the Globus family of brands gives them something most river cruise lines don't have: deep infrastructure for land-based touring. When the river requires a change of plans, Avalon can tap that infrastructure quickly. It also means their crews have more authority to make on-the-spot decisions without waiting for approval from a centralized operations team. Several mornings during our trip, we were finishing breakfast while our cruise director was already on the phone with local suppliers, quietly rerouting the day around a docking change or a revised departure time. Other lines running a centralized planning model can handle these situations, but the disruption tends to be more visible.

On our cruise, low water levels on the lower Mosel prevented us from making the transition onto the Rhine, which meant one extra night on the Mosel instead of ending in Rüdesheim as planned. Guests with Frankfurt tours were accommodated; those of us who stayed aboard got an unscheduled stop at a Mosel village that turned out to be a highlight of the trip. Avalon arranged our airport transfers regardless, so the only casualty was the original itinerary. If you approach the inevitable adjustments as part of the adventure rather than a failure of the plan, you'll come out ahead. We did.

For anyone concerned about water levels: the most reliable windows are early summer, after winter flood conditions have passed, and late fall, after autumn rains bring levels back up. If your travel dates don't fall in those windows, the key is booking with a line that keeps guests on the water — or at least moving — regardless of conditions, rather than one that parks you on a bus and calls it a cruise.