Biden will travel to the US Virgin Islands for a short vacation

President Biden traveled to a place he knows best on Tuesday — the U.S. Virgin Islands — to enjoy some time and warm weather and ring in the New Year with family.

The president and his wife, first lady Jill Biden, flew from Washington to St. Croix, one of three islands in the Caribbean, on Tuesday. Saint John and Saint Thomas are the other two islands. The Bidens were joined by their daughter Ashley and her husband Howard Crean, as well as granddaughters Natalie and Hunter, the president’s late son Boo.

St. Croix is ​​a tropical trip that Mr. Biden has been taking since at least his vice presidency from 2009 to 2017.

“I missed him the last two years,” Beth Moss Mehr, a retired attorney and island resident of three decades, said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Biden They spent the holidays at their home in Delaware in 2020 and 2021, mostly due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This week’s St. Croix visit to the US Virgin Islands will be his first as president.

“We’re very honored,” Rep. Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat who represents the Virgin Islands in Congress, said in a phone interview Tuesday.

“When he and his family came in the past, the views of President Biden were almost legendary,” she said.

Any view will change now that Mr. Biden is considered one of the world’s most powerful men. As such, he now travels on a much larger footprint than during his time as vice president, including numerous US Secret Service agents, White House staffers, and reporters covering his travels.

Mr. Biden and his wife enjoy spending the week between Christmas and New Year in warm weather, and Jill Biden loves the beach, aides said.

“We always look forward to his arrival and we really understand that this is a place of relaxation for him and Jill and any other family that he brings with him, so we just leave him alone and let him relax,” Donna Christenson said. He was Plaskett’s predecessor in Congress.

“Most of the time I’ll be living in St. Croix in my next life,” he says in a phone interview.

Plaskett and Christensen both expressed hope that Biden’s end-of-year vacation focus will intensify the challenges facing the U.S. Virgin Islands and other U.S. territories, such as the threat of climate change, more powerful storms and rising sea levels, as well as the challenges these governments face in coping with aging infrastructure. .

Mr. Biden was scheduled to return to Washington on January 2. That comes on a day when the president’s Democratic Party could cede the House of Representatives to the Republican Party following November’s midterm elections, potentially complicating Biden’s legislative agenda for the rest of the two years. His time.

Democrats will continue to control the Senate in Congress, which sits on January 3.