Hidden Gems of New England, hosted by CapRadio and TAUCK World Discovery – Oct. 8 through Oct. 15, 2016.
Personalized service, quality experience and inclusive value are hallmarks of Tauck's United States trips. Crafted by Tauck and filmmakers Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan, our journey takes you through the heart of New England, a special place in American history and American thought. Dayton recently reflected: "New England has become Ken Burns’s backyard – not just the place where he’s raised his family and made his documentaries in the classic New England town of Walpole, New Hampshire, but also a place intertwined with many of the stories he’s told: Mark Twain, The Shakers, Baseball, The Civil War and The National Parks: America’s Best Idea."
Every day has been carefully designed to provide you with memorable moments, from rich cultural connections made through locally guided sightseeing to a taste of regional cuisines, and outstanding accommodations in the hearts of Boston and Hartford, mountains and coast. We’ve made great friends with local experts, from a naturalist to a farmer / journalist, who enrich your journey with their unique insights.
And you'll enjoy a Tauck On-tour Exclusive – filmed narratives by filmmakers Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan that share personal stories of the poets, authors, dreamers, visionaries, idealists and unsung heroes who defined the New England landscapes – behind-the-scenes commentary you simply can't get on your own.
We’ve built our business on one principle – to provide guests with the very best travel experience possible, with an uncompromising focus on personalized service, quality experience and inclusive value. Just about every travel expense is included in one up-front price; there are no hidden costs, no surprises – and no options sold on tour. Traveling with Tauck is peace of mind travel at its best.
Travel with our Tauck Directors, who provide warm, caring, thoughtful service throughout your trip, taking care of every detail so you connect with people and places, centuries-old traditions, and daily life. You'll return home refreshed, ready to do it all again!
I encourage you to make your reservation soon to be sure to get the departure date you want – space is filling quickly! Call Gloryvette Lichtman with Cruise Planners at 916-985-2900.
Thank you – and I hope you join us on this amazing journey that's from the heart.
Sincerely,
Daniel W. Mahar, CEO
Hidden Gems Of New England
Crafted by Tauck and Ken Burns Designed by filmmakers Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan, this singular journey through the picturesque heart of New England tours landmarks, homes, farms and wild natural settings that evoke the spirit of a place whose ideas shaped America. Classic New England lives in Boston Common, in the White Mountains aglow with autumn colors, in the general store, the diamond at Fenway Park, and the sustainable soil of Billings Farm... in the whimsical design of the Mark Twain House and the simple gifts of the Shakers... in Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ studio where images of American heroes were forged, in millwheels, covered bridges, and whitesteepled churches, and the rocky soil that has long been fertile ground for thinkers, artists, writers, inventors, entrepreneurs and Revolutionaries. This is, as Dayton Duncan observes, Ken Burns’s backyard: “New England has always had a special place in American history and American thought. And New England has become Ken Burns’s backyard – not just the place where he’s raised his family and made his documentaries in the classic New England town of Walpole, New Hampshire, but also a place intertwined with many of the stories he’s told: Mark Twain, The Shakers, Baseball, The Civil War and The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. It’s a distinct region with its own beauty and its own secret treasures – and who better to share them but one of its proudest residents.”
Trip pricing. Departing on October 8, 2016:
- Single occupancy - $4,428 per person
- Double occupancy - $3,590 per person
- Guest Protection Plan - $199 per person
Deposit $350
Final payment due: August 9, 2016
Reserve Your Trip
For direct access to CapRadio Hidden Gems Of New England Tauck Tours registration and general information, please click here.
Questions?
Contact Gloryvette Lichtman at [email protected] or 916-985-2900.
Cruise Planners is managing all registrations for the Hidden Gems Of New England Tour.
ITINERARY
Trip Includes:
- Filmed vignettes by filmmakers Ken Burns & Dayton Duncan that tell the stories of visionaries and ordinary people that shaped the places that define New England
- Visit Ken Burns’s private studio in Walpole, New Hampshire
- An exclusive wildlife presentation by an expert naturalist, featuring a live hawk
- Private guided tours of the Mark Twain House and Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Hartford
- Guided tour of legendary Fenway Park & a tasting tour of Charles Street eateries in Boston
- Guided visits to a Shaker village and Billings Farm and Museum
- Airport transfers upon arrival and departure as noted
- 17 meals (7 breakfasts, 4 lunches, 6 dinners), service charges, gratuities to local guides, admission fees, taxes and porterage
Day 1 - Welcome To Boston
Tour begins: 5:30 PM, The Westin Copley Place, Boston. A transfer is included from Logan International Airport to The Westin Copley Place, Boston. Please join us this evening for a welcome reception at the hotel, followed by a welcome dinner at a local restaurant in the heart of Boston.
Meals: D
Lodging: The Westin Copley Place, Boston
Day 2 - Historic Boston And A Foodie Tour Along Charles Street
Begin today's exploration of America's "Cradle of Liberty" at Boston Common, where you'll see famed sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ stirring memorial to Col. Robert Gould Shaw, the Harvard-educated son of privilege who led the first African-American regiment in the Civil War; the bronze memorial, which took Saint-Gaudens 14 years to complete, is startling in its detail, and has been acclaimed as the greatest American sculpture of the 19th century. From the Common, continue your discovery of Boston landmarks that figured prominently in America's early history, including the Old North Church, the Old State House and the South Meeting House. Next, head out on a walking tour of Charles Street in Beacon Hill, lined with elegant Federal-style townhouses, gas lamps, and brick sidewalks, where a local food expert takes you on a tasting excursion through the neighborhood’s most exciting eateries. The afternoon is yours to explore more of the city as you wish. Tonight, you’re free to dine on your own in Boston; trendy Back Bay and its fabulous restaurants are at your doorstep.
Meals: B
Lodging: The Westin Copley Place, Boston
Day 3 - Fenway's "Field Of Dreams," Lexington & Concord And On To Hartford
In his films Baseball and The Tenth Inning, Ken Burns offers a glimpse into the soul of our “national pastime”; for many, it lives at Fenway Park, America’s oldest ballpark and home of the Boston Red Sox since 1912. Past glories come alive on a walking tour of the stadium that may include some its most famous landmarks, such as the Triangle, Pesky’s Pole, the former location of Duffy’s Cliff, and the legendary Green Monster of left field. Depart baseball’s field of dreams and the city of Boston itself for the nearby flashpoint of the American Revolution, the Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concord. First, head to Lexington Green, where the “shot heard ‘round the world” that began the Revolution was fired. Next it's on to Concord where, after lunch at a historic inn, you'll visit Concord Bridge, site of Emerson’s hymn, and the iconic Minuteman statue, cast from the bronze of Civil War cannons, in Minute Man National Historic Park. Continue on to the day's final destination, Connecticut's capital city, Hartford. Have dinner tonight at your leisure in your downtown hotel.
Meals: B, L, D
Lodging: Hartford Marriott Downtown
Day 4 - From Mark Twain & Harriet Beecher Stowe's Hartford To Vermont
In his film Mark Twain, Ken Burns says of Samuel Langhorne Clemens: “He was a tireless wanderer who lived in a thousand places all around the world. He would call just two of them home: the Missouri town of his childhood... and the magnificent Connecticut house he built for his wife and children, which he hoped would shelter them from hardship, but where heartbreak found them nonetheless.” At the Mark Twain House & Museum, Twain’s beloved homestead on Farmington Avenue, architect Edward Tuckerman Potter designed a “house fit for a poet” – a Victorian Gothic masterpiece of function and fantasy; its rooms, decorated by Louis Comfort Tiffany, brighten with stories as a docent guides you on a private tour through the Clemens family’s inner life. Clemens flourished here as a writer, producing works including The Gilded Age, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. And despite a series of tragedies endured by the family, he counted his years in Hartford (1874-91) as the happiest of his life. To him, the house was a beloved family member; “Our house had a heart, and a soul, and eyes to see us with... We were in its confidence, and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction.” Only steps down Farmington Avenue from the Mark Twain House, visit the home of Harriet Beecher Stowe. When Clemens built his home here, it was partly to be near his publisher but also to be a member of the Nook Farm community, an enclave of writers, artists and radical thinkers that included the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A private tour of Stowe’s modest Victorian home offers insights into “the little lady who started the Civil War” (as Lincoln called her), a mainstay of the influential literary circle that they considered their extended family. Depart Hartford and cross into central Massachusetts and the scenic Pioneer Valley of the Connecticut River, dotted by towns surrounded by unspoiled forest and fertile farmland. Arrive in historic Deerfield, where the 18th century returns to life among the town’s restored homes and period furnishings; enjoy lunch at the restored Deerfield Inn. Push further north into the wilds of Vermont and settle in at the Hawk Inn & Mountain Resort in Plymouth, a classic New England inn set against the breathtaking Green Mountains.
Meals: B, L, D
Lodging: Hawk Inn & Mountain Resort
Day 5 - Saint-Gauden's Vermont To New Hampshire, Ken Burns' Backyard
Cultural treasures beckon this morning in Cornish at the home of Augustus Saint-Gaudens – the pre-eminent sculptor of Beaux Arts-era monuments commemorating Civil War heroes – who bought the property in 1885 from a man who persuaded him that the area was full of men who looked like Abraham Lincoln (he needed a model for his Standing Lincoln at the time). The sculptor’s estate eventually became the center of an influential artists’ colony whose residents included Maxfield Parrish and Thomas Dewing, but whose reach extended across the nation, drawing to itself artists like Daniel Chester French and Frederic Remington, as well as actors, writers and celebrities like Edwin Booth and Isadora Duncan, Woodrow Wilson and Finley Peter Dunne. Visit Saint-Gaudens’ studio and gardens, now a National Historic Site, displaying many of his works including sculptures, reliefs and coin designs. After lunch, make your way into the New Hampshire countryside where Ken Burns, as Dayton Duncan says, “put down roots in the 1970s when he set out to transform the telling of American history through documentary films.” Get an inside look on a visit to Ken’s private studio in the town of Walpole, where his Florentine Films was founded. Return to Vermont and take a trip back in time at The Vermont Country Store in Rockingham, an emporium harkening back to the general stores of bygone days. Home to “purveyors of the practical and hard-to-find,” this family business has been famous for its mail-order business since 1946, and you can lose yourself here in its vast inventory of housewares, toys, penny candy, delicacies, dry goods, and rural New England nostalgia. Then head back to your Vermont resort for dinner and time spent as you please this evening.
Meals: B, L, D
Lodging: Hawk Inn & Mountain Resort
Day 6 - Billings Farm And The White Mountains
Begin the day with perspectives on the evolution of the New England landscape and efforts to balance agriculture and conservation in the region from Steve Taylor, a dairy and maple farmer, scholar, journalist and former New Hampshire Commissioner of Agriculture. When railroad executive Frederick Billings (for whom the town in Montana is named) retired in 1871 and returned to his Woodstock, Vermont, roots to start a dairy farm, he opened a book called Man and Nature by George Perkins Marsh. Embracing its ideas of sustainable land use and forest conservation, within a few short years Billings had created a model farm whose cows and produce gained national attention. Meet the Jersey cows at Billings Farm and Museum, and get a firsthand look at its farming and forestry methods, which changed ideas about farming in turn-ofthe- century New England. Have lunch on your own in town; in fall, indulge in autumnal panoramas of New Hampshire's White Mountains en route to the glaciercarved pass at Franconia Notch (a place of dramatic waterfalls and rock formations, once home to the legendary Old Man of the Mountain); then arrive for a night’s stay at the Mountain View Grand Resort & Spa, a spectacular 19th-century resort with observation towers, its own working farm, and “green” electricity generated by an onsite wind turbine.
Meals: B, D
Lodging: Mountain View Grand Resort & Spa
Day 7 - Simple Gifts From The Shakers And On To Maine
A wildlife talk at your resort this morning offers an appreciation of the ecology of the glorious landscapes, summer and autumn, that you’ll journey through today en route to the Shaker community at Canterbury. The religious sect known as the Shakers arrived in America from England in 1774; almost none of their settlements remain today, and their culture, aside from their much-admired architecture and furniture-making, is fast disappearing (“I almost expect to be remembered as a chair or a table,” an elderly Shaker sister reflects in Ken Burns’s 1984 film, The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God) – but Shaker ideals of simplicity, industriousness, and equality of the sexes once inspired Transcendentalists, feminists and thousands of ordinary folk in search of a better life, and their contributions in labor-saving inventions have had a profound influence on American culture. Experience their “simple gifts” firsthand at the village, a well-preserved settlement established in 1792 that includes a meetinghouse, schoolhouse, gardens, farmhouses, and many original buildings, and have lunch. Then wind your way to Maine and an overnight stay at the Cliff House Resort & Spa in Cape Neddick, with spectacular ocean views. Cap this most memorable of New England tours with a farewell reception and lobster bake dinner at your resort tonight.
Meals: B, L, D
Lodging: The Cliff House Resort & Spa
Day 8 - Journey Home
Tour ends: Boston. Fly home anytime after 2:00 PM. A transfer is included from The Cliff House Resort & Spa in Maine to Boston's Logan International Airport. Allow 2 hours for flight check-in.
Meals: B
ACCOMODATIONS
The Westin Copley Place, Boston
Nights 1, 2 - Boston, Massachusetts
Enjoy a relaxed setting in the heart of Boston's trendy Back Bay district at The Westin Copley Place, Boston, winner of the AAA Four Diamond Award®. Furnished with cherrywood armoires and desks, spacious guest rooms feature the Heavenly® Bed with its plush mattress topper, triple sheeting, down blankets, comforters and duvets, and the marble Heavenly Bath® with dual showerheads. Each is equipped with remote control TV, complimentary cable access, hairdryer, oversized Brazilian combed cotton bath sheets, make-up/shaving mirror, telephone, coffee maker with Starbucks® Coffee, safe, iron and ironing board. Dining options offer variety and quality – including authentic gaucho-style steaks and Brazilian specialties at Fogo de Chão®; Boston's renowned seafood at Turner Fisheries Restaurant and Bar; traditional sushi and more at Osushi; lighter Mediterranean cuisine and signature cocktails at Bar 10; and breakfast or brunch at The Huntington.
Hartford Marriott Downtown
Night 3 - Hartford, Connecticut
Located in the Adriaen’s Landing District of Connecticut’s capital city, the Hartford Marriott Downtown overlooks the Connecticut River and enjoys an AAA four Diamond rating. Local attractions such as the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Old State House are within walking distance and the interactive Connecticut Science Center is adjacent to the hotel. Guest rooms welcome with 300 thread-count bed linens, down comforters and plush mattresses, 37-inch flat-panel LCD HD television with Jack Pack technology and other appreciated amenities. The Fitness Center offers cardio equipment and free weights and an indoor swimming pool with views out over the city as well as a whirlpool. The onsite Starbucks Café has everything from the caffeine jolt you might be craving to sandwiches, panini and wraps; ice cream, yogurt and fruit; baked goodies; bistro boxes and hot breakfasts. VIVO, the hotel’s Zagat-rated Italian restaurant is an upscale trattoria featuring a seasonal menu using “fresh ingredients, prepared simply” with a distinctly Mediterranean flavor in combination with a creative Napa Valley style.
Hawk Inn & Mountain Resort
Nights 4,5 - Plymouth, Vermont
Situated on 1,200 pristine acres – which include the Resort’s own 70-acre nature preserve – in the heart of Vermont’s gorgeous Green Mountains, the Hawk Inn & Mountain Resort offers many activities and amenities in a truly stunning setting. Radiating tasteful charm and warm Vermont hospitality, the individually decorated guest rooms feature cable TV and private baths with bathrobes. Both an indoor and a year-round heated outdoor swimming pool await, along with three tennis courts, and massages at the Hawk Spa. The River Tavern Restaurant offers delectable regional New American cuisine.
Mountain View Grand Resort & Spa
Night 6 - Whitefield, New Hampshire
One of America’s truly historic hotels, the Mountain View Grand Resort & Spa has enjoyed a storybook setting in the heart of New Hampshire’s spectacular White Mountains since 1865, when a stagecoach overturned nearby and the occupants were directed to the nearby farm of William and Mary Jane Dodge, with whom the long tradition of Mountain View hospitality began. As the years went on, what became a grand, landmark hotel has been a “retreat-of-choice” for presidents, socialites and celebrities. Today’s guests find first-class comfort combined with casual elegance in guest rooms featuring luxurious bed linens, custom bath products, custom-carved mahogany furnishings and other welcoming amenities. Dining options include the Main Dining Room; classic, casual fare at at the Tavern; the Club House overlooking the onsite golf course; or tapas-style cuisine with mini-New England-inspired sample platters at the Veranda. Awarded four Diamonds by AAA as well as recognition for excellence by the readers of Condé Nast Traveler and Travel + Leisure, the resort also features indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a spa, tennis courts and a working farm on the premises.
The Cliff House Resort & Spa
Night 7 - Cape Neddick, Maine
Perched on the craggy cliffs of the Maine coast, the Cliff House Resort & Spa is everything you have ever imagined that a Maine oceanfront resort would be. Generations of the Weare family have been welcoming guests here since 1872, including such folks as the Philadelphia Biddles, and the Cabots and Lodges of Boston. Guest rooms feature views of the coast and the ocean, cable TV, hairdryer, coffee maker and other amenities to ensure an enjoyable stay. Two adults-only swimming pools invite a dip after a busy day. The Cliff Spa, which encompasses the ocean-view fitness center providing Star-Trac treadmills, elliptical cardiovascular training machines, Nautilus Selectorized weight training equipment and Cybex free weight training equipment, invites you to come, relax and be pampered. The Dining Room, with a view of the sea is a favorite southern Maine restaurant for visitors and locals alike, due, in part, to its superb traditional lobster dinner and signature creations like Blueberry Halibut. The Ocean Terrace is the place to linger over cocktails or the resort’s justly famous desserts.
Reserve Your Trip
For direct access to CapRadio American Canyonlands Tauck Tours registration and general information, please click here.
Questions?
Contact Gloryvette Lichtman at [email protected] or 916-985-2900.
Cruise Planners is managing all registrations for the American Canyonlands Tour.