5-Day East Coast Classics: New York to D.C., Niagara Falls & Boston Tour

You step onto the coach in lower Manhattan before dawn, the city still rubbing sleep from its eyes. Streetlamps blur into the bus’s warm interior lights as the guide passes out itineraries and the driver pulls away from Chinatown toward the highway — five days of America’s civic and natural landmarks waiting like map pins. The first morning is all skyscraper angles and subway histories; by day two the marble columns of the U.S. Capitol and the quiet gravity of the Lincoln Memorial replace neon. Then the road opens to upstate New York: a thunder that seems to grow in the chest as Niagara’s mist appears on the horizon. Finally, Boston’s brick-lined streets and Harvard’s austere quad close the loop.