American Splendor

American Splendor was delivered by Chesapeake Shipbuilding on March 6, 2016 under the name America, and she was then the largest overnight passenger vessel the yard had built. She is 296 feet overall and carries 180 guests, which still makes her the biggest of American Cruise Lines’ four paddlewheelers, thirty more berths than American Heritage, her near-twin from the year before. She took her present name in the 2022 refit that also produced American Heritage and American West.

What actually separates her from her sisters

Very little, and it is more honest to say so than to invent distinctions. The public rooms are the same set of names in the same places: the Paddlewheel Lounge aft, the River Lounge forward, a Midship Lounge, the Sky Lounge up top, the Study, one glass-enclosed restaurant with a single open seating, a fitness room and a guest laundry. The decor came out of the same 2022 program. The paddlewheel on her stern is decorative on this boat too; diesels drive her, and the wheel is there because the wheel is the point of the silhouette.

The difference is size. Thirty extra guests on a hull under three hundred feet is a real difference in how full the lounges feel at six in the evening, and she carries a slightly wider spread of stateroom categories to fill it. If you have sailed American Heritage and are choosing between them, choose on the itinerary instead; you will not notice much else.

Where she actually sails

Two rivers, in that order: the Lower Mississippi first and the Tennessee second. The paddlewheel silhouette leads people to assume the Mississippi and nothing else, and for once the assumption is roughly right about the largest part of her year.

Her biggest program is the Lower Mississippi River cruise, Memphis down to New Orleans at seven and eight nights. It runs one way and it runs downstream (Memphis is where you board and New Orleans is where you get off, sailing after sailing) calling at Cleveland in the Mississippi Delta, Vicksburg, Natchez, St. Francisville, Oak Alley and Baton Rouge. This is the antebellum-South week the line built its name on, and she carries a great deal of it. Boarding at Memphis and stepping off in New Orleans also means two cities worth staying an extra night in at either end, which the round-trip versions of this river do not give you.

Her second program is the eight-night Tennessee Rivers cruise, Chattanooga to Nashville, calling at Decatur and Florence in Alabama, Savannah in Tennessee and Paducah in Kentucky, with scenic passage through Land Between the Lakes and out onto Lake Barkley and the Cumberland. She shares that route with the modern riverboat American Symphony and carries the larger half of it.

Chattanooga is the interesting end of it. Getting there means working up the Tennessee through a staircase of TVA locks, and the lift at Chickamauga is the kind of thing you go up on deck to watch. The route is sold on Civil War ground, Muscle Shoals and Nashville, and it is one of the few river cruises in the country where the landscape does most of the work rather than the towns.

The rest of her calendar is Nashville-facing too, which is the thread that ties her year together: an eleven-night Smoky Mountains National Park package from Knoxville with Pigeon Forge and a park day bolted on the front, a fifteen-night Mississippi and Cumberland run from New Orleans that comes up through Clarksville and Dover, a Music Cities week from Memphis, and a short Highlights of the Mississippi loop out of New Orleans and back. Between the Mississippi block and the Tennessee block she works nearly the whole calendar, breaking only for midwinter.

Who she suits

People choosing on river rather than on ship. If you want the Deep South (the plantation stops, Vicksburg, Natchez and a slow arrival into New Orleans) the Memphis run is the volume seller in this fleet and she is one of the boats carrying it. If you want the Tennessee Valley instead (the locks, the Shoals, the Land Between the Lakes stretch and Nashville at the end), she is one of only two boats offering it at all. That week is better-looking than the Lower Mississippi and it is much less traveled.

She does not suit people who want a ship as the destination. There is one restaurant, one seating, no pool, no casino, and the evening entertainment is a lecturer or a musician in a lounge. The clientele skews well past sixty. And if the working paddlewheel is what drew you in, be clear that it does not work; it is a very good-looking piece of trim on the back of a diesel riverboat.