No! I love Renn fests!
It’s just that I have had friends/relatives come visit and want to see the Renn Fair as they had never been to one…and they end up hating it. They expect something different. Cruises can be the same if someone has never been on one.
I and my lady at the time took the Delta Queen (capacity 180) from NOLA to Natchez and back in 1981 and 1991, both of them Thanksgiving cruises. Alas, she is laid up at the moment although there’s talk about reviving her.
The first cruise we were in our 30s and almost the youngest on board. There was a 16-year old daughter with her family and newly-wed Britons on a leg of their three-month honeymoon in the US. One big advantage of a river cruise over an ocean cruise is that, particularly on the lower Mississippi, you’re rounding a bend every few miles and getting a whole new vista.
!! 
Well I should HOPE…
…oh, you were referring to the boat.
Never mind.
(I have got to do something about my reading comprehension issues…)
Your reading comprehension is fine. Some of us need to work on writing less ambiguous prose.
I in fact had cruised on the Delta Queen, and I knew that boat is down for either scrapping or a comprehensive / expensive rehab the company may not be able to swing.
Even with that background knowledge, I still thought @DesertDog’s woman was laid up and needed … reviving? WTF!? Oh, the boat! I get it.
My / our Delta Queen cruise would have been in about 1997 from Memphis upstream to St. Louis where we lived at the time. It took about 45 minutes of air time to ride the jet from St. Louis down to Memphis, and a full 7 days to paddlewheel our way back up.
The food was great, the pace extremely leisurely. The crowd was a convivial bunch, although a bunch older than we then were at age ~40.
The “scenery” on the Mississippi River is pretty minimal. Hundreds of miles of mud banks with the same raggedy 75 foot trees lining both banks. About once every 6 hours a small town passes by. Largely hidden behind the 20 foot tall concrete flood wall that keeps the river out of downtown every spring. Once in awhile a hill can be seen in the distance.
I haven’t been on one myself, but several friends of mine have, and they all loved it. For all the reasons mentioned above. I’d like to do the Danube route…it’d be awesome to do a side trip to see the towns my grandparents came from.
This has all been so interesting, thank you! I’ll be stashing more into my “fun stuff” account so we can do the upgraded stuff. Time to start researching 
Pay attention to the Viking website, assuming you aren’t inundated with their mailings. They frequently have sales. I waited just long enough this time and got free airfare, a discount and a free drinks package. We couldn’t get a balcony room until October, but that was fine with us.
Although we haven’t taken our Viking ocean cruise yet (Empires of the Mediterranean in July), I’ll just point out that, yes, if you want to drink like a fish, the drinks package may be worth it, but if not, it probably isn’t.
Free house wines and beers are included with all lunches and dinners. My wife has one or two glasses of wine with dinner, and I may have a beer or a cocktail once or twice during our ten-day cruise. Clearly, for us a $500 drinks package ($25 per person per night, both parties must take it) makes no sense.
I agree with this. We will be signing up for Viking excursions at every port, and for our four-day post-cruise extension in Athens. In every port there is at least one tour that is included in the fare; the rest are at an additional charge ranging from $59 to $249 per person
I’ve heard elsewhere that it’s important to sign up as early as possible. You can book excursions online a few months before you set sail, the opening date being based on your fare class. Higher categories get earlier access. So on Sunday, April 16, at 3 pm EDT, we will be signing up for the nine excursions we have carefully selected from the 72(!) that are offered on our trip. Three of them are no extra charge, the rest will total $1,600 for the two of us.
However, I suspect that on a river ship, with about 1/5 the capacity of a Viking ocean ship (200 passengers vs. 1,000), excursions filling up isn’t as much of a problem.
A little Googling confirmed my hunch that, unlike the ocean cruisers, Viking River ships only have one restaurant. So this advice won’t apply to the OP.
We’ve never done this on the bigger ships we’ve been on, since the menus looked less than awesome. But we live near a big city with a diverse restaurant scene. I suspect that for someone coming from a small town this would be a great option.
Just a point about river levels. This is a lottery - too much water and the boats can’t get under the bridges. Too little and they would get stuck.
Generally speaking, spring and fall are the best times to choose, but floods and droughts can happen at any time of year.