Grand Circle Travel has returned with a newly redesigned Web site featuring its just-announced 2003 list of tours for the over 50 crowd. Today, we're featuring its most popular itinerary through Northern Mexico and the Copper Canyon, a 14-day trip costing as little as $1,095, which works out to $79 a day. The tours operate weekly from early January through mid June of 2003.
You start in Tucson, where you stay at the Doubletree Guest Suites, a 3-star hotel, and visit the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, then on Day 3 cross the border to San Carlos in Mexico, where you stay at the Plaza Hotel, also a 3-star property, and take a cruise on San Carlos Bay, part of the Gulf of California. On Day 6 you move on to El Fuerte, where you tour the Colonial Alamos, and on Day 8 travel on restored, private cars of the Chihuahua el Pacifico Railroad (nicknamed El Chepe) for a ride through the Sierra Madre mountains. In the evening, you stay at a one-star hotel in Divisadero and visit Balancing Rock. The next day, you push on, this time by bus, to Chihuahua itself, where you sleep in the 3-star Hotel Palacio del Sol. After a night in that town, you cross the border again to Las Cruces in New Mexico, where you put up at the 3-star Hilton, ending up the next day back in Tucson, and the same hotel from which you started.
The tour includes 13 nights' lodging in comfortable rooms with private bath, 28 meals (13 breakfasts, seven lunches and eight dinners, including one lunch on the railroad), seven sightseeing tours, the rail journey, a Spanish lesson, a tour at a Mexican university, a folklore show, a basket weaving demonstration, lunch at a family-owned apple orchard, and a home-hosted dinner, as well as your private bus transport, not to mention baggage handling for one piece per person, including tips. (Airport transfers are not included.)
Grand Circle Travel, in business for 44 years, specializes in tours for mature travelers and can be reached at 800/959-0405 or through their Web site, www.gct.com.