Sailing Into Adulthood Onboard a Disney River Cruise

17.12.2024 - 23:21 / cntraveler.com

This is part of Conde Nast Traveler's spotlight on family cruise travel. For more, visit cntraveler.com.

We are on the banks of the Rhine River in Basel, Switzerland, many of us in our swimsuits. Dry bags shaped like fish fall from our necks, protecting phones, wallets, and anything else we don’t want to get wet. We are preparing to step out into the flow of passing barges and bobbing river cruise ships, to be carried with the flow down Europe’s busiest river. My niece Maddy, however, has her phone firmly in hand, a short distance from her face. “It says this is how some people here commute to work,” Maddy says, looking up from her phone. Well, if she is going to be on TikTok, at least its to help us better engage with what we are seeing before us.

I’ve come to hereto board the 156-passenger AmaLucia for a week-long Adventures by Disney Rhine River Cruise that winds through four countries—Switzerland, Germany, France, and the Netherlands—along the Rhine.

I have an ulterior motive—to get Maddy, who is 18 and fresh out of high school, to fall as hard for Europe as I did back when I was a young backpacker close to her age, with a soft Disney landing.

Back then, I remember how vast and full of possibilities the world instantly felt on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, beyond the small Florida town where I went to college. Watching the departures board flick through destinations at Gare du Nord, my Eurail Pass and a Let’s Go guidebook in hand, it felt like I could go anywhere, do anything, meet anyone.

Guests traveling on the Adventures by Disney Rhine River Cruise

Maddy has of course come of age differently, tethered to technology and scheduled to the point of little down time. I’ve traveled with her since she was young, including trips to Jamaica where she tasted her first Caribbean mango (ruined her for life) and Key West, where she first peered at the underwater world through a snorkel mask. Now I can see her taking the lead when it comes to what to do.

She tap-taps her phone to find the nearest proprietor of the dry bags and offers to watch her six- and seven-year-old cousins, my kids, as I stuff my clothes inside the Wickelfish, which doubles as a floatie, and wade into the brisk river.

When I planned the trip, I wondered how my niece—at the cusp of adulthood and all the freedom that ushers in—would react to joining us for a Disney-themed adventure to kick off a year of travels that would include scuba diving in Fiji, backpacking through Australia, and climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.

I chose the Rhine River itinerary because it’s nostalgic—nearly a repeat of the first trip my parents took me on to Europe, with a classic itinerary visiting small villages and cities like Heidelberg, Cologne, and