NEW YORK CITY – “THE BIG APPLE”

September 17-23, 2012                      7 Days

Meals included:3 CB, 1 L, 1 D

Price per person {Includes Basic Trip Insurance}

            Single:  $2300             Double:  $1730            Triple:  $1510

Various accounts have traced the “Big Apple” expression to Depression-Era sidewalk apple vendors, a Harlem night club, and a popular 1930s dance known as the “Big Apple.”  In fact, it was the jazz musicians of the 1930s and ‘40s who put the phrase into more or less general circulation. If a jazzman circa 1940 told you he had a gig in the “Big Apple,” you knew he had an engagement to play in the most coveted venue of all, Manhattan, where the audience was the biggest, hippest, and
most appreciative in the country.  The older generation of jazzmen specifically credit Fletcher Henderson, one of the greatest of the early Big Band leaders and arrangers, with popularizing it, but such things are probably impossible to document. Be that as it may, the ultimate source actually was not the jazz world, but the racetrack.  Turf scribe Jack FitzGerald dubbed his long-running column
“Around the Big Apple”; by his own account, he’d borrowed the term from “two dusky stable hands” overheard after a race at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans.

As diversified as the accounts of the origination of its nickname so is the city with its numerous ethnic neighborhoods, cultural districts, and historical areas.  Our 2012 tour re-visits a few of the iconic New York sites such as Ellis Island, the financial district, Central Park, and Fifth Avenue.  Each time Wiersema Tours go to New York City we have visited the World Trade Center site; the 9/11 Memorial is scheduled to open the week prior to our arrival.  Every effort will be made to obtain tickets to the Memorial Museum that bears solemn witness to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  Demonstrating the consequences of terrorism on individual lives and its impact on communities at the local, national, and international levels, the Museum attests to the triumph of human dignity over human depravity and affirms an unwavering commitment to the fundamental value of human life.  Tour price includes admission to attractions mentioned previously plus the following:

• Visit to ABC Good Morning America Show

• Backstage tour of Radio City Music Hall

• Visit to USS Intrepid

• Dinner at the Russian Tea Room

• Evening Broadway performance

• Noshing tour of the Jewish Lower East Side, Little Italy & Chinatown

• Free time for dinner in Times Square

• Evening visit to Top of the Rock Observation Deck

• Visit to Chelsea Market, home to the Food Network

• Walking tour of Greenwich Village