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Message from the International Monetary Fund Retiree Association (IMFRA)
IMFRA is in the process of trying to organize a trip for retirees in the Fall of 2012 through New England to Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. To make the trip halfway affordable we need to get a group of about 40 persons together. We are hoping to have about 20 IMFRA retirees participate and wonder if 1818 Society members might be interested to make up the balance?

The cost at this point is hovering around $2,000.- per person double occupancy. With 40 we might be able to reduce that by several hundred dollars.
Our program provides for the group to meet on September 29 in Albany, NY and to overnight at the Crown Plaza Hotel. The next day we would travel by motor coach to Franklin Roosevelt’s estate, Hyde Park, and after touring the estate, drive to the Culinary Institute of America (the US Cordon Bleu School of cooking) for lunch. The night would be spent at the Red Lion Inn in the Berkshire Mountains. The next day we would then drive through scenic New England, enjoying the Fall foliage, to the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods. Day four we would take a cog railroad to the top of Mt. Washington, spend one hour at the top and have lunch. The afternoon would be free time and in the evening we would have a farewell dinner. – We are hoping to be able to persuade Jim Boughton, the former Fund historian, to give us a talk at that dinner, but that is not yet arranged. On day five, October 4, we would travel to Manchester, NH and participants would have made individual travel arrangements to depart from there.
See the attached draft tour description for more details.

The tour is being organized for us by Academic Travel Abroad (ATA), they are a DC based, upscale tour organizer and have arranged two very successful tours for us to Florence and Greece. They will have a marketing brochure available in PDF format shortly.

One big problem for us at this point is that the Mt. Washington Hotel will only take reservations without cancellation penalties if firm bookings are made by November 1, 2011. That may be hard to comply with for most of our retiree members. The tour organizer thinks that if we write an official letter to them emphasizing the problem and indicating that a group of retirees from the IMF and World Bank coming to visit where their organizations were born, may be able to persuade them to allow us maybe another month or two for blocking rooms without penalty.

1818 members interested in participating may please email IMF Retirees Association .