WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Tuesday was headed to a place very familiar to him — the U.S. Virgin Islands — to enjoy some downtime and warmer weather and to ring in a new year with family.
The president and his wife, first lady Jill Biden, departed Washington on Tuesday for St. Croix, one of three islands that make up the U.S. territory in the Caribbean. St. John and St. Thomas are the other two islands. The Bidens were joined by their grandchildren Natalie and Robert.
St. Croix is a tropical getaway that Biden has been getting away to at least since he was vice president, from 2009 to 2017.
“We’ve missed him the last couple of years,” Beth Moss Mahar, a retired attorney and island resident for nearly three decades, said in a telephone interview.
Biden spent the holidays at his home in Delaware in 2020 and 2021, mostly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This week’s visit to St. Croix will be his first as president to the U.S. Virgin Islands.