Nathan's Insights

I unexpectedly had to make new plans for my upcoming world trip commencing in November 2026 (see Trip Plans). Trafalgar contacted my last month and advised that thir Best of Greece tour in December wasn’t going ahead. I was very dissappointed to say the least.

Working with one of their consultants I was offered other tours Trafalgar or one of their other companies run. Tours either in Greece or around Greece were unsuitable as they clashed with my other tours that were going ahead.

In the end I selected a river cruise with Trafalgar: Rhine Christmas Markets cruise. I had been considering one day doing a European River cruise and a Christmas Markets cruise has a lot of appeal.

Visiting German, French and Switzerland towns and their Christmas markets seems a little magical, as long as I survive the weather!

Trafalgar is new to river cruising so should be interesting experience. As a land tour company they are reliable so I’m hoping the same applies on water 🙂

Apparently the river ship we are on, the Trafalgar Verity, has a working fireplace which will come in handy during December (Europe winter).

To do this trip I had to cancel the extra days in Jordan (as the river cruise starts earlier than the cancelled Greece land tour), cancel and replace multiple flights, and then come up with new plans post the river cruise.

In the end my nephew (Harry) came up with the idea to spend the week between the end of the river cruise and the start of our Spain, Portugal, and Morocco Adventure tour exploring Switzerland in winter 🙂

This means we had to cut down our extra days in Madrid but with our cruise finishing in Basel, Switzerland it made the idea too tempting to not explore this marvellous but expensive country.

I left our new planning for Switzerland up to Harry to create and he came up with a plan that will see us utilise Swiss rail and spend 3 days in Interlaken (as a base to explore the local area), 2 days in Zermatt, and half a day in Bern on the way to Zurich before our flight to Madrid.

While I’ve been to Switzerland before it was as a backpacker in summer this is a totally different trip. I am very impressed by the plan Harry has created and I’m very excited for what is has in mind in particular seeing and exploring the area around the Matterhorn.

I’ll now move the Greece visit to my trip with my niece Darby in our Europe Summer 2028 trip. So Greece in summer and Switzerland in winter seems like a good switch.

So while this was annoying, and it is much much more costly (and I’ll need to save a but more), I feel like this is a great and major upgrade. We are now only 4 months out now from starting the 52 day trip and it is getting very exciting.