If you're a seasoned traveler who's been there, done that, try a riverboat cruise. After all, sometimes you just want to take it easy and watch the scenery go by with a few leisurely adventures, of course, thrown in along the way.

I've just returned from a cruise in Russia, of all places, spending 11 nights aboard the Viking Surkov, a 400-foot, 190-passenger ship, sailing from Moscow up the Volga River, through canals, rivers and about a dozen locks, across lakes and estuaries, all the way to St. Petersburg, one of the most magnificent cities in the world.

I'm here to tell you that this is the way to go.

To begin with, traveling on a small ship through waters where the land is almost always in plain view is much more intimate than sailing on a huge cruise ship carrying thousands of people.

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You get to know almost everybody on board and can always manage to find some compatible souls among them. On the Surkov, one of Viking River Cruises' many ships plying waterways all over Europe and Asia, there was just one big dining room and no assigned tables. That meant we could choose our dining companions as we pleased. We could sit wherever we wanted, joining one pair of travelers for breakfast, a group at lunch, another couple at dinner. Eventually we made friends with some of our fellow travelers, the majority of whom were, as we used to say, "of a certain age." The food, produced by Austrian chefs, was tasty, and the young Russian waitresses all spoke English well enough to deal with us.

The most difficult decision we had to make on our entire voyage was whether to choose chicken or fish for dinner. Whenever we stepped on shore, we were escorted by well-trained guides who shepherded small groups to our destination of the day. That is especially handy in a place like Russia, where the alphabet is different from ours. Unless you speak Russian you can't read a solitary word, including the road signs.

Getting to Russia was easy a flight to Paris, then another to Moscow but it was one long journey. There are no direct flights from the United States to Moscow, so I suggest you break it up as we did not and spend a couple of days in Paris or whatever other city is on your itinerary. That way you'll have your wits about you when you get there.

Witless, weary and irritable, we were met at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport and transported to the Northern River Terminal on the Moskva River to board our ship and settle into our tiny cabins.

I'm talking tiny. Furnished with two narrow beds, a small table between them, a closet, and multiple shelves and drawers, our little cabin turned out to be functional and cozy once we got used to it, but its most remarkable feature was the bathroom.

The bathroom had only a toilet and a washbasin. To take a shower, you pulled a shower curtain around the toilet and grasped the faucet from the sink. Attached to a flexible hose, it hooks onto a fixture above, showering you and the rest of the room with water that then drains through the floor. Never mind, it works and that's what counts. The ship does have a couple of dozen deluxe cabins, and a few even larger suites, all with the kind of showers we know and love.

Next morning, rested, we climbed into our buses, about 20 of us per bus plus a guide and a driver, to spend the day in Moscow, a city with some startlingly beautiful buildings but a numbing number of cinder-block housing projects and oppressively drab Soviet-era architecture.

We started with a ride on the underground Metro system built in the Soviet days. If you've ever traveled by subway in Queens or the Bronx, you'd be amazed by these beautiful, elegant subway stations with their sculpted pillars, ornate chandeliers, colorful murals and huge bronze statues of soldiers, farmers, factory workers and sharpshooters, everything spotlessly clean.

Next was Red Square, a large open space dominated by Lenin's Tomb and the glorious St. Basil's Cathedral, immediately recognizable by its colorful onion domes. Across the street, the famous GUM department store is now an elegant shopping mall filled with upscale boutiques and luxuries so steeply priced that only nouveau riche Russians can afford them. That evening, we all went to a performance of the Moscow Circus to see its incredible jugglers, high-wire artists and famous animal acts.

On our second day in Moscow we explored the vast Kremlin, actually a walled city built as a fortification that encloses cathedrals, palaces, museums and government buildings, ringed by 18th-century towers. Its most impressive site is the medieval gold-domed Cathedral of the Assumption, the coronation site for the czars of Russia.

Leaving Moscow that afternoon, we sailed into the Moscow Canal, built by Stalin in the 1930s to connect the city with the Volga River, and passed through our first lock that evening. It was a lovely structure topped by bronze sculptures of old sailing ships. All night and the next morning, we cruised through the countryside, passing little towns and domed churches and attending an excellent lecture on Gorbachev and the breakup of the Soviet Union.

After lunch, the ship docked at the small village of Uglich to explore the Church of the Transfiguration's baroque icons and to see the "Blood Church" built on the site where Ivan the Terrible's son Dimitri was murdered in the 16th century.

Before I go any further, let's talk shopping. All the women (and some of the men) on our ship were over-the-top shoppers and I was no exception, always on the hunt for good deals and ethnic souvenirs. We found them.

Wherever we went in Russia we found stalls lined up, one after another, laden with wonderful wares unique to this part of the world and cheap, cheap, cheap. In Uglich, I bought two shawls, a woven linen tablecloth and a fanciful glass bird. At our next stop, Kostroma, I invested in three wristwatches with enameled bands ($15 each), a painted wooden bowl, a painted wooden serving spoon, three dolls dressed in Russian outfits and five sets of Russian nestling dolls.

At Kostroma, we toured the 14th-century Ipatyevsky Monastery. In Yaraslavl, founded in the 11th century by a prince on the spot where he had once killed a bear, we explored the ancient Church of Elijah the Prophet with its five green domes, strolled the riverside promenade, and spent our rubles in a vast open-air market.

The tiny island of Kizhi was last on the list before St. Petersburg. Here we walked through the open-air museum of architecture, a World Heritage site, and exclaimed over a church built completely of wood without a single nail and boasting 22 timbered domes.

Between shore excursions, we lounged aboard ship, chatting, reading, attending fascinating lectures on the Russian history and politics from the Romanovs to Vladimir Putin. We drank wine while we listened to a pianist play Chopin, attended a vodka tasting and a crew talent show, ate too much food, and picked out villages and gold-topped churches among the linden and birch forests on shore.

At last we arrived at St. Petersburg (once known as Leningrad) on the Gulf of Finland that leads to the Baltic Sea. Built over swampy marshes by thousands of slaves three centuries ago, this glittering city was conceived by Peter the Great, the half-mad czar who loved European culture and created Russia's "window to the West."

It has also been called the "Venice of the North" because it spans 42 islands surrounded by canals connected by about 300 bridges. Besieged and bombarded by the Nazis for 900 days during World War II, its magnificent buildings were badly damaged, many even destroyed, but all were painstakingly restored in time for the city's 300th birthday last year. It's a great walking city, so pack some comfortable shoes.

Among the splendid gold-encrusted palaces you must see in St. Petersburg are Peterhof, the czar's summer palace so ornate as to rival Versailles, where from the marble terrace you can see the Grand Cascade of three waterfalls, 64 fountains and 37 statues ringed by gardens; the opulent Hermitage, Peter's 1,000-room pale-green-and-white winter residence which now houses a vast art collection; and Catherine's Palace, with its famous Amber Room paneled in slabs of amber. In the evenings in this fairytale city, we were entertained by a performance of the ballet Swan Lake, a folklore show, and a canal-boat tour.

After our couple of days here, it was time for a new batch of passengers to take over our cabins for the same voyage in reverse. We packed up our bags, hugged our new friends good-bye and flew home to extoll riverboats as a leisurely, relaxed way to see the world. Call 1-800-640-4899 for our discounted rates when you have decided on a month for your cruise.