AmaDante

AmaDante was delivered in 2008 from Scheepswerf Grave in the Netherlands, which makes her one of the oldest ships AmaWaterways still runs in Europe and one of the last from the era before the company settled on a single hull. She is 360 feet long. The Rhine and Danube boats built from 2010 onward are 443. That eighty-three-foot difference is the reason she is on the Seine, and it is the reason most of what is written about the newer ships does not describe her.

The generation before the twin balcony

AmaWaterways’ signature is the twin balcony: a French balcony and a separate step-out veranda in the same stateroom, on a hull no wider than a competitor’s. It arrived in 2010, on AmaBella. AmaDante is two years older than that and does not have it. Her eight stateroom categories run from 170 to 255 square feet, and most of them have a French balcony (a full-height window that opens onto the room, with a rail), and that is all. If the twin balcony is the reason you chose this line, this is the ship in the fleet where you will not find it.

The rest of the ship is scaled the same way. Seventy-one staterooms, 140 guests at double occupancy, forty-five crew, four decks. There is a whirlpool on the Sun Deck rather than the heated swim-up pool the 443-foot ships carry, along with a walking track. Below it are two lounges, the Main Restaurant, The Chef’s Table for a set multi-course dinner, a fitness room, a hair salon and massage service. The elevator reaches the Violin and Cello decks and stops there.

She does have one thing the big ships mostly do not: a single-occupancy stateroom category, sold as its own room rather than as a double with a supplement. On a fleet-wide basis those cabins are scarce, and they are on the older, smaller hulls.

Where she actually sails

France, specifically the lower Seine, and effectively nowhere else.

Thirty-two of her departures are Impressions of the Seine & Paris, seven nights, running Le Havre to Paris seventeen times and Paris to Le Havre fifteen. Those two ports are her whole turnaround pattern; Le Havre takes ninety-three calls and Paris ninety-two across a thirty-nine-sailing schedule, because she sits at each end of the week and because the Normandy landing beaches are a day out of Le Havre.

In between: Rouen thirty-eight times for the cathedral and the old town, Vernon thirty-eight for Monet’s garden at Giverny, La Roche-Guyon seventeen, Mantes-la-Jolie fifteen, Caudebec-en-Caux fifteen in the Normandy bend of the river, and Les Andelys six below Château Gaillard. That is a short list of places within a short stretch of river, which is what a Seine week is.

The other product on her calendar is six departures of the fourteen-night Grand Seine & Dutch Impressions, listed Paris to Amsterdam, which brings Dordrecht, Antwerp, Ghent, Brussels, Kampen and Amsterdam into her port list. Read that carefully before booking: AmaWaterways sells its fourteen- and twenty-one-night “Grand” cruises as combinations of two shorter itineraries, arranged around ship-to-ship transfers. The Seine has no waterway connection to the Netherlands that a 360-foot ship could use, so the Dutch and Belgian half of that fortnight is a second week on a second boat. The database files the whole fourteen nights under AmaDante because she starts it.

Her season is March or April through October, and it stops. There is not a single winter departure on her schedule (no Christmas markets, no January city weeks) which is the opposite of what the Rhine ships in this fleet are doing.

Who she suits

Someone whose trip is France. The Seine week is Paris at one end, Normandy at the other, Giverny and Rouen in the middle, and a great deal of moored time in places you can walk off into; it is the least strenuous river itinerary this company sells, and the ship’s small size means the excursion groups are smaller than they would be off a 156-guest boat. Solo travelers should look at her specifically, for the single stateroom category.

She is the wrong ship for anyone shopping on hardware. She is eighteen years old, she has French balconies rather than twin ones, there is a whirlpool where the newer ships have a pool, and the cabins at the bottom of her range are 170 square feet. Anyone who wants the current AmaWaterways product should book a 443-foot hull and accept a different river. She is also wrong for anyone expecting the classic river-cruise experience of a new country every second day; this is one country, one river and about a hundred and twenty miles of it. And if the reason you are looking at her is the fourteen-night Paris-to-Amsterdam run, confirm with the line which vessel operates each half before you decide you are booking this one.